Your Daily Dose of Climate Hope: October 4, 2024
Fighting avian malaria with human ingenuity!
The National Park Service is pioneering clever new methods to save Hawaiian honeycreepers from avian malaria.
Tell Congress to sustain BIL and IRA funding for this epic project!
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Reasons For Hope
The colorful and diverse Hawaiian honeycreeper birds have been devastated by the avian malaria carried by mosquitoes accidentally brought to the islands in the 1800s, with only 17 of an estimated 50 species in the bird family having escaped extinction. Some species survived on the mountaintops too cold for mosquitoes, but global warming now imperils these last refuges.
Now, a boldly proactive new conservation project is working to give them a chance, led by the U.S. National Park Service and made possible by funding from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and Inflation Reduction Act!
In addition to ongoing mosquito net-shielded captive-breeding work for many Hawaiian honeycreeper species, conservationists have dropped 10 million male mosquitoes onto Maui’s mountaintops in recent years. This may sound counterproductive, but it’s part of a family of recently developed anti-mosquito methods that are starting to be used with great success around the world. These male mosquitoes have been inoculated with Wolbachia bacteria, which alters their reproductive cells to make them unable to reproduce with local females who carry a different Wolbachia strain, eventually cratering the total population. Here’s a video.
Climate change has been widely forecasted to bring boom times for mosquitoes with grave consequences for humans and animals, but we can prevent this with the ever-expanding horizon of human ingenuity! Now it’s up to Congress to continue BIL and IRA funding for the National Park Service’s hard work.
Such important work. Thank you to all involved!