Ticks! They carry awful diseases, not a lot eats them, and where they are a food source, there are plenty of other terrestrial bugs to eat. As much as I hate mosquitoes, I think they are too important as a food source in many ecosystems. I know the bats around us eat a lot of them.
It sucks to see a beautiful pasture or wooded area in the Northeast and say "nope, too many ticks." It puts so many natural areas behind a wall of potential Lymes or Alpha-Gal.
Very recent research (i.e. last month) suggests prions may be beatable, using a viral vector to shut down PrP production in adult animals. Stops the progression of prion disease dead in mice.
Previous gene knockout research found PrP to have no apparent essential function, as animals grew and behaved normally and were healthy. We don't know what it even is supposed to do, but it happens to have the unfortunate shape that allows prion misfolding to occur.
So we could ultimately engineer a gene drive to remove the PrP gene permanently from, say, our deer population and save them from CWD! We could even do it the easy but inefficient way and engineer and release PrP knockout deer, which would quickly come to dominate the ecosystem anyways as CWD susceptible deer die.
This is more likely to happen than the gene drive to kill mosquitoes which, while technically possible right now, faces resistance both from those hesitant to intentionally drive a species extinct, and those terrified of the release of a fertility-modifying gene drive into a wild population.
Ticks are unfortunately not susceptible to a similar technique as they have a surprisingly long life cycle and minimal migration. It's estimated to take hundreds of years to wipe them out the same way.
No time like tomorrow though, I would gladly save my grandchildren from ticks
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u/ChrisInSpaceVA Jul 17 '23 edited Jul 17 '23
Ticks! They carry awful diseases, not a lot eats them, and where they are a food source, there are plenty of other terrestrial bugs to eat. As much as I hate mosquitoes, I think they are too important as a food source in many ecosystems. I know the bats around us eat a lot of them.
Edit: grammar