Alphabet Inc., the owner of Google, will be using another one if its companies, Verily, to release 20 million bacteria-infected mosquitos into the wild in order to fight disease spread in California.
The revolutionary plan uses Verily's mosquito-producing robot, whose launch was announced in October, to raise up to a million sterilized mosquitos a week for 20 weeks. The company is working with Fresno's Consolidated Mosquito Abatement District to release mosquitos that have been sterilized by the bacteria Wolbachia pipientis. The idea is that these sterile males will mate with females and lead to a drop in the insect's population, as well as the rate at which diseases like the Zika Virus and Dengue Fever spread.
The campaign was launched in solidarity with Debug Fresno, an organization that aims to reduce the spread of disease by aggressive mosquito populations. The plan is seemingly a very successful way of addressing the issues that California's mosquitos pose. The male populations being released won't produce offspring and reportedly don't bite.
Additionally, the Wolbachia infection only serves as a sterilizer to males of the species, meaning female populations won't experience mutations or changes to the natural process.
Stephen Dobson, an entomologist from the University of Kentucky, told The Verge that "Wolbachia works like a lock-and-key system for mosquito reproduction" when discussing how the infection will stop eggs from developing.
For anyone worried about the far reaching ecological effects of the experiment, Dobson's company MosquitoMate conducted an earlier run of the test with 800,000 infected mosquitos in 2016. At the time, the EPA claimed it had little impact on anything other than mosquitos trying to reproduce. In fact, the experiment was so successful that the EPA renewed the permit for the experiment to continue and expand.
In addition to Alphabet Inc., the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation also took a look at this groundbreaking idea. The mosquitos should be released fairly soon in California, but there are also plans to conduct a trial in Austrailia to test whether the project can work in other environments.
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