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Re:Mosquitoes Are a Choice by DoctorOetker on Monday October 05, 2026 @05:22PM (#49970968)
How many simultaneous mosquitos in Singapore?

lets say on the order of 1 billion, and let's assume the effectivity doesn't change when considering the 30% unaffected population

it would need to be applied to the surviving 30% repeatedly:

0.3 ^ N = 1 / 1B

so N = log(1B)/log(10/3) = ~17.2 times.

I predict nature protects itself with diversity: some of the male and female wild type will have natural aversion from, attraction to or neutral stance the modified Wolbachia carriers.

I predict that those mosquito family lines that happen to be more Wolbachia-carrier averse become enriched over time.

There is an energetic cost to maintaining a parasitic lifeform, and that energetic term will always favor immunity against the parasite.

Re:Mosquitoes Are a Choice by shellfishgene on Tuesday October 06, 2026 @04:42PM (#49983802)
The parasite will also evolve to maintain infection, otherwise parasites would not exist...
Re:Mosquitoes Are a Choice by DoctorOetker on Wednesday October 07, 2026 @04:14PM (#49998184)
The hosts originally had their normal wild type gene regulation.

After infection one can approximate the novel gene regulation to be a combination of the host wild type gene regulation, perturbed by the Wolbachia gene regulatory network.

The metabolic rate of the Wolbachia will be a function of genome variations in the wild type population. The population (even if fully infected) thus has access to a whole bunch of knobs (promoter region binding affinities) and can continuously shed the metabolic burden of the parasite by natural selection, since 2 infected mosquitos, with differing levels of Wolbachia metabolism / reproduction, will have more energy and amino acids available for flight, healinig / repair, eggs, ... so that over a number of generations the Wolbachia incidence rate falls back to equilibrium levels. Then its a matter of time until a dormant virus or a one of the many virus particles scattered in nature and a mosquito meet again.