Should We Make the Mosquito Extinct?

Mosquitoes are more than just a nuisance. Through the transmission of disease, they kill more people than any other animal, earning them the title of deadliest organism on the planet.

We’ve tried many ways to keep them away and kill them but nothing has worked completely.

But now we might have the means to kill them all — to actually make them extinct.

Should we?

The last mosquito on earth is born this way.

Three days after the egg is laid, the larva emerges

Its childhood is spent on the surface of a stagnant puddle and it lasts the entirety of a week.

If it’s male, he whiles a way his days feeding on flowers before succumbing to old age within a few days.

If it’s female, she will have an entire month to gorge herself on the blood of nearby vertebrates.

Either way, the mosquito will be extinct within a matter of weeks.

It will take with it not only the capacity to spread death and disease amongst its vertebrate prey but the secret to its own demise.

Buried deep within the genetic code of that last mosquito is a gene that renders the organism sterile.