Sterilize insects
I had a question for UC Riverside entomologist Dr. Amy Murello. Bark beetles are killing our national forests. You have mite problems, mosquitoes. Isn’t there a body of research somewhere in the world of entomology where we might introduce some kind of genetic castration and, as a result, limit the populations of unwanted insects?
Yes. This idea of stereralization is actually not new. I don’t know if you’re familiar with screw worms, but they were a devastating cattle pest in the 1950s. And they are fly maggots that feed on live meat. So if you had cattle and it had a flesh wound, these flies would lay eggs and the maggots would do a lot of damage while feeding them. And that fly was essentially wiped out from North America by this idea of sterilization. And that happened with radiation. You have been irradiated. So it wasn’t even a genetic component. Now there are many people trying to solve mosquito problems by either genetic modification or some other method of sterilization. But there are just many factors, such as that mosquitoes’ life cycles are quite complex. It can mate multiple times and lay multiple batches of eggs.
It makes this type of control and other insect species much harder to use. Hopefully we’ll get there sooner rather than later.
