Hacker News Reader

Comment by BurningFrog | Hacker News Reader

So 5% of mosquitos in one area has the microbe.

If it has a survival benefit for mosquitos, it will reach 100% by itself. Since that hasn't happened, I'm a little worried that there are some caveats here.

View on HN

Maybe it happened already. Growing in Kenya in the 80s, many regions were considered malaria endemic. A number of this regions from these 2000s are now considered malaria-free. Could this be the reason? I don't know.

Sure, one possible explanation is that this is in the process of happening naturally. Next year 5% will be 6%, and so on.

Most tropical/subtropical areas that are malaria-free did it by virtually eliminating mosquitoes with pesticides long enough that malaria was virtually eliminated in the human population, which eliminated malaria in the mosquito population when the mosquitoes rebounded.

I don't think the malaria virus affects the mosquito itself from what I can tell, so it's inconsequential to the mosquito and its reproduction whether it has the fungus or not.

An ecologist friend explained to me once that humans can often do things that slowly increase the percentage of some species at the cost of others.

It isn't going to be much of a benefit to the mosquitoes, because malaria doesn't kill them

For the mosquito, it's just one potential disease from one potential food source.

Malaria isn't really that bad of a time for mosquitoes anyway. It might even increase their chances of reproducing by driving them to feed more on humans.

test

Reply on news.ycombinator.com