Take advantage of ... flies, mosquitoes in scientific research

These seemingly useless animals are helping scientists in new research projects.

Flies help treat waste

The booming population plus the growing manufacturing industry are making people living with huge amounts of waste. Although at present, factories or industrial zones have the processing of organic waste, but the number being put into the untreated environment also accounts for a significant proportion.

However, in the future, this amount of waste will be the main source of material in the conversion of organic waste into animal food with the work of scientists at Karma3 Biotechnology Company, which has pillars. based in Melbourne, Australia.

The black soldier fly is used to convert organic waste.

Accordingly, this work will convert all kinds of organic waste into an organic compound used in the livestock industry. The crux of the technology is the black soldier fly larvae , which is capable of converting organic materials into a material used to make food for animals.

Specifically, in a life span of only about one week, a black soldier fly will produce about 100 to 500 baby flies before dying. As soon as the eggs start to hatch, they will convert the surrounding organic matter into an organic root material. This compound has an organic composition of up to 60 to 65%, besides the rest is a mixture of carbohydrates and fat, it will be an extremely suitable choice to replace soybean meal or fish meal, 2 types Food is used mainly in livestock.

'It can be said that our work is going against natural processes and the fact that we are improving it to create more useful materials for people, while also helping to treat organic waste. toxic muscle, has provided raw materials for the livestock industry , 'said Martin Pike, head of the project.

Not only does it use natural metabolic processes to turn organic waste into animal food, but it is also highly valued when using black soldier flies, which are known to be non-pathogenic insects. . Therefore, the organic compound produced by the black soldier fly larvae promises to remove the harmful impurities in the waste to produce the highest quality animal food.

Use sterile mosquitoes to . kill mosquitoes

Verily, a small company in Alphabet, USA, has just launched DebugFresno project for the purpose of eliminating mosquitoes. Accordingly, they will drop 20 million male sterile mosquitoes across 2 residential areas of Fresno County, California.

Infertile male mosquitoes are released into residential areas to limit their reproduction.

This is considered a safe method to combat the threat of disease spread by mosquitoes around the world. The idea of ​​scientists is to use the technique of infertility insects (SIT) , releasing large numbers of non-fertile insects into nature to reduce their numbers.

SIT has successfully deployed many times around the world over the past 50 years, eradicating some harmful insects such as US screw flies and Mexican fruit flies in Northern Mexico. The process of causing the infertility of insects is related to the use of radioactive material but this technique is thought to be ineffective for mosquitoes.

Currently, scientists have turned to a newly emerging natural bacterium called Wolbachia. The study found that male mosquitoes infected with this bacterium are infertile. They still find female mosquitoes to mate, but the female mosquito's eggs do not hatch into larvae. The release of large numbers of male mosquitoes infected with Wolbachia will consume local mosquito populations for a short time.

Male mosquitoes do not burn and suck blood, so releasing large amounts of them into the environment will not affect human health.