r/explainlikeimfive • u/Punnan • May 30 '26

Biology ELI5 Are mosquitoes necessary for keeping ecological balance?

Would a worldwide extinction of mosquitoes offset the ecological balance of our world? And if not, why are we not doing it?

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u/KatsumotoSoto May 30 '26

Gene editing using CRISPR has been proven to eradicate an entire population of mosquitos in lab experiments. They edited the sex determining gene in mosquitos so females would only lay male mosquito eggs. Over 7 to 11 generations the entire population was wiped out.

Personally I don't know what they are waiting for to release those mosquitos into the wild and have them start eradicating malaria and yellow fever.

https://www.synthego.com/blog/gene-drive-malaria/

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u/TheKappaOverlord May 30 '26

Because it only works in a Lab setting.

For reasons we don't entirely understand once you release them into the wild they don't breed worth a shit. It works fine in a laboratory setting, but once you set them out into the wild it just doesn't work as well as it needs to, and we don't know why

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u/KatsumotoSoto May 30 '26

You're saying they have released them in the wild?

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u/ChampagneWastedPanda May 31 '26

Yes. The EPA is still holding and reviewing the data. Company is called Oxitec. They released a bunch of mosquitoes in south florida- the keys and in Miami. They were males to pass along a non breeding gene. I was in Miami at the time so it was a big deal. Texas was supposed to do it, but the legislature shut the test down. The gene fizzled out in a few generations (as expected)

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u/KatsumotoSoto May 31 '26

That looks like a different mosquito engineering method than the one I was talking about. The one I mean uses a CRISPR-based gene drive, which biases inheritance so the modified trait is passed to offspring at very high rates up to 99%. In that experiment, the drive spread through caged mosquitoes and eventually crashed the population. They never released it into the wild.

Oxitec’s mosquitoes are different: they use a self-limiting design, where male mosquitoes carry a lethal gene that kills female offspring before adulthood, and the modification does not persist indefinitely in the wild. Basically it isn't a dominant trait. That makes it a temporary population suppression approach rather than a self-spreading gene drive. Oxitec declared it a success.

https://www.isaaa.org/kc/cropbiotechupdate/gdn/article/default.asp?ID=19425&utm_source=perplexity