Scientists Are Making Mosquitoes Deaf In Order To Keep Them From Having Sex

Life as a young single mosquito could be getting a lot tougher. That is if the scientists at the University of California, Santa Barbara have their way.

This group believes they’ve discovered a way to keep the insects from spreading diseases like dengue, yellow fever and Zika. The solution, reports the BBC, is to make male mosquitoes deaf.

(Image Credit: Getty)

Hearing, according to these , is an integral part of how mosquitoes have sex. They do the deed while flying. I bet these scientists can’t do that.

The males use their hearing to find the ladies based on the female’s “attractive wingbeats.” The scientists made the discovery by altering the male mosquitoes’ genetic pathway for hearing.

What they found were a depressed group of male mosquitoes who made no physical contact with the females, even after spending several days in the same cage with them. I might have added the depressed part, but that’s a safe assumption.

The real twist in the entire study is that female mosquitoes are the ones that spread the diseases to people. The lab coats believe that by turning the males into deaf sexless insects, it will prevent babies from being created and reduce the mosquito population.

Scientists are keeping mosquitoes from having sex by making them deaf

While that is true, what about letting nature take care of those sorts of things? These cruel scientists studied the mating habits which – no shaming here – can last anywhere from a few seconds to nearly a minute.

They then got to work messing with it and found a protein that they could use to make the mosquitoes deaf and got to work. The deaf ones didn’t have sex.

The mosquitoes who were left as nature intended got to work quickly. They got down multiple times and impregnated nearly all the females that were left in their cage.

This is a promising study to some scientists, never mind the fact that while some mosquitoes carry diseases, they’re also a part of the food chain and play an important role in pollination.

I’m sure those are details that can be ironed out at a later date. Right now, the focus is on continuing to study the sexual behavior of mosquitoes. Imagine waking up every day and heading off to do that.