The tech boss launched ... to kill mosquitoes

Researchers in Silicon Valley are deploying a large-scale mosquito killer program in Fresno County in California, USA by releasing about 80,000 "warrior mosquitoes" into the environment.

Mr. Jacob Crawford - senior scientist at Verily Life Sciences, a research company of Alphabet Corporation (Google's parent company) - shared the mosquito raised in Verily's automatic mosquito breeding system in the southern city of San Francisco and being infected with a common bacterium.

When male mosquitoes infected with Wolbachia are released naturally and mate with female mosquitoes, female mosquitoes cannot lay eggs anymore. So, all the mosquitoes as well as the diseases they mediate can be completely destroyed.

According to Bloomberg news agency, many other high-tech mosquito killing methods have been introduced. Among them, US billionaire Bill Gates pledged to spend more than $ 1 billion on technologies that could help clear malaria, including an attempt to transform the controversial mosquito genome. Meanwhile, Verily's approach is based on an "old-fashioned-earth" strategy that interferes with the fertility of mosquitoes.

A Verily employee is checking the mosquito larvae tray at the plant in California - USA.(Photo: BLOOMBERG).

At Verily's headquarters, the factory of "mosquito warriors" is automated. When mosquito eggs are laid, robots feed them to adulthood and then put them in containers filled with water and air, feed and keep warm. Some other robots have a duty to classify mosquitoes by gender. All selected mosquitoes will be digitally identified so that researchers follow from the egg state to specific GPS coordinates where they are released.

Every morning during the active season of mosquitoes (April to November), Verily's trucks ran along wooded areas in Fresno County to release mosquitoes. At predetermined locations, an automated algorithm will drop the number of carefully calculated mosquitoes into the environment. This year, Verily conducted the second mosquito release.

In just over 6 months, the company released more than 15 million mosquitoes. Results from 2017 show that the number of sucked mosquitoes has decreased by 2/3 and this year, this figure is 95%. Verily's second project in Innisfail - Australia ended in June also helped kill 80% of the mosquitoes.

It is not clear after this year's program ended, Verily will expand its operation next year or not because the cost of raising this mosquito is quite expensive. In addition, according to Bloomberg, it is unclear what the world will be like if mosquitoes become extinct. The ecological role of mosquitoes has not been fully studied, although some scientists think it is okay to not have them.