{"id":171,"date":"2009-01-06T17:37:17","date_gmt":"2009-01-06T21:37:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/esa.org\/esablog\/?p=171"},"modified":"2009-01-06T17:37:17","modified_gmt":"2009-01-06T21:37:17","slug":"the-ecology-within","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/esa.org\/esablog\/2009\/01\/06\/the-ecology-within\/","title":{"rendered":"The ecology within"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><span style=\"color: #000000\">The concept of biological control is no new idea in ecology \u2013 people have been transporting living things to control other living things since the <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Myna\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">late 18th century<\/a>. The most famous examples seem to be the big failures, where biocontrols become invasive themselves \u2013 such as mongooses introduced to Hawaii to control rats but that instead decimated populations of native birds.<a href=\"http:\/\/blog.wired.com\/.shared\/image.html?\/photos\/uncategorized\/2008\/12\/31\/mosquitobiting.jpg\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignright img-fluid\" style=\"border: 2px solid black;margin: 10px;float: right\" src=\"http:\/\/blog.wired.com\/wiredscience\/images\/2008\/12\/31\/mosquitobiting.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"331\" height=\"192\"><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #000000\">Geneticists at the University of Queensland have now successfully applied the biocontrol concept to the ecology of a disease \u2013 dengue fever, to be precise. The researchers have cultured a strain of the <em>Wolbachia <\/em>bacteria that cuts the lifespan of mosquitoes in half \u2014 enough time to prevent the dengue virus within them to mature. The result is that even when infected young mosquitoes bite onto human flesh, the human gets away dengue-free.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #000000\">The bacteria don\u2019t prevent the mosquitoes from breeding, so introducing the <em>Wolbachia <\/em>into wild mosquito populations won\u2019t wipe them out. Because only the longest-living insects harbor the mature, virulent dengue, <\/span><span style=\"color: #000000\">the researchers also think that the bacteria is \u201csafe\u201d: <\/span><span style=\"color: #000000\">the disease probably won\u2019t be able to evolve a shorter life cycle itself. But, of course, this remains to be seen in the wild.<br>\n<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #000000\">Just goes to remind us that ecology is as important in the guts of some of the smallest animals on the planet as it is across continents.<br>\n<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #000000\">Read more about Scott O\u2019Neill and his colleagues\u2019 work in last week\u2019s <a href=\"http:\/\/www.sciencemag.org\/cgi\/content\/full\/sci;323\/5910\/141?maxtoshow=&amp;HITS=10&amp;hits=10&amp;RESULTFORMAT=&amp;fulltext=Stable+Introduction+of+a+Life-Shortening+Wolbachia&amp;searchid=1&amp;FIRSTINDEX=0&amp;resourcetype=HWCIT\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Science<\/a> (full text by subscription only) and in this great <a href=\"http:\/\/blog.wired.com\/wiredscience\/2009\/01\/green-mosquitoe.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">article on Wired.com<\/a>.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The concept of biological control is no new idea in ecology \u2013 people have been transporting living things to control other living things since the late 18th century. The most famous examples seem to be the big failures, where biocontrols become invasive themselves \u2013 such as mongooses introduced to Hawaii to control rats but that instead decimated populations of native&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":50,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[124,125,126,109],"class_list":["post-171","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-research","tag-biocontrol","tag-disease","tag-disease-ecology","tag-invasive-species"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/esa.org\/esablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/171","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/esa.org\/esablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/esa.org\/esablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/esa.org\/esablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/50"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/esa.org\/esablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=171"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/esa.org\/esablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/171\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/esa.org\/esablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=171"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/esa.org\/esablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=171"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/esa.org\/esablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=171"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}