“For more than a year now, a group of environmental organizations have been dropping biodegradable containers of mosquitoes into honeycreeper habitats on Maui and Kauai from helicopters. Now they’re starting to do it with giant drones. The containers fall to the ground without a top, and when they land the insects escape into the forest.

Critically, these are not your typical mosquitoes. They’re all males, which don’t bite, that have been reared in a lab. More importantly, they contain a strain of bacteria called wolbachia that interferes with reproduction: When those males mate with females in the area, their eggs fail to hatch. (That’s thanks to a bit of biology magic, referred to as the incompatible insect technique, or IIT.) 

The idea is to continually release these special males into honeycreeper habitat where malaria is spreading as a way to erode the population of biting mosquitoes — and thus suppress the spread of disease. The approach has little ecological downside, said Chris Farmer, Hawaii program director at American Bird Conservancy, a conservation group that’s leading the drone effort. Mosquitoes are not native, so local ecosystems and species don’t rely on them.”

From Vox.