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Principal Skinner: Well, I was wrong. The lizards are a godsend.

Lisa: But isn't that a bit short-sighted? What happens when we're overrun by lizards?

Principal Skinner: No problem. We simply unleash wave after wave of Chinese needle snakes. They'll wipe out the lizards.

Lisa: But aren't the snakes even worse?

Principal Skinner: Yes, but we're prepared for that. We've lined up a fabulous type of gorilla that thrives on snake meat.

Lisa: Then we're stuck with gorillas!

Principal Skinner: No, that's the beautiful part. When wintertime rolls around, the gorillas simply freeze to death.

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This was tested in Singapore 10 years ago and successfully reduced the spread of Dengue fever by 77% and has not negatively impacted the ecosystem.

This isn't a project to eliminate all mosquitos. There are over 3600 species of mosquito - this project is only targeting one: Aedes aegypti, which spreads many diseases, and is in fact an invasive species. Anywhere you see an Aedes aegypti outside of North Africa, it was humans who brought it there in the first place. This project is just trying to undo that.

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> Aedes aegypti, which spreads many diseases, and is in fact an invasive species. Anywhere you see an Aedes aegypti outside of North Africa, it was humans who brought it there in the first place.

My twisted brain spun out a version of this paragraph from some kind of parallel universe Hacker News (presumably where humans aren't the dominant species on the planet) that said:

> Homo sapiens, which spreads many diseases, and is in fact an invasive species. Anywhere you see a Homo sapiens outside of North Africa, it was humans who brought it there in the first place.

I think it's fun that my brain decided to come up spin the accepted African origin of humans and their proliferation around the world into this fun paragraph. No value judgement about humanity is implied.

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In the FAQ they discuss how in most of its range this particular species is invasive, feeds almost exclusively on humans, and is not believed to be a major food source for predators.
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It's impossible to prove this (or really anything in human health/global ecology) is safe. We cannot reliably predict what the true short and long term outcomes will be, but by and large, this seems like one of the less unsafe ecological modification projects based on the underlying technology.
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