They eat up various crops. They are largely resistant to insecticides. They cause losses of up to $5 billion annually. These are diamondback moths, one of the major insect pests in the world.
To try to suppress their population in a sustainable way, an international team of researchers has created a strain of genetically engineered diamondback moths and released them into the wild for the first time.
For the study, published Wednesday in the journal Frontiers in Bioengineering and Biotechnology, the researchers engineered the moths so that when the males of the strain mated with wild females, the female offspring would die during the caterpillar life stage.
The male offspring, however, would survive and mate with the remaining female moths, repeating the cycle with their offspring until the overall population is reduced.
This action, however, raises some concerns.
More details over at Futurism.
(Image Credit: Olaf Leillinger/ Wikimedia Commons)
On the one hand, genetic engineering has a lot of promise; on the other, we don't know fully how genes work, so many GMOs are a crapshoot. We should be very cautious when releasing any genetically modified fauna or flora, but on the other hand we need to keep the research going. GMOs aren't bad in themselves - it all depends on how we (and especially Big Agra companies) use them.