MONOLOGUE WRITTEN BY CLYDE LEWIS

There is hardly anything that moves, flies or crawls which has not at one time, served as a sign of a good or bad omen. Human activity throughout time has often had a superstition stamped on it.

Throughout history, insects have frequently played a direct role in human events. Plagues and pestilence have been read about in the Bible – and of course, we have talked about the winged Assyrian demon Pazuzu that brought with him winds plagues, and locusts.

The other night, I was talking about the Sixth Extinction, the Shuman Resonance, and how animals have been reacting to fluctuations in the magnetic field.

Magnetoreception is a sense which allows an organism to detect a magnetic field to perceive direction, altitude or location. This sensory modality is used by a range of animals for orientation and navigation, and as a method for animals to develop regional maps. For the purpose of navigation, magnetoreception deals with the detection of the Earth’s magnetic field.

Magnetoreception is present in bacteria, arthropods, mollusks and in some insects.

While insect infestations have always been connected to weather changes, I have had my concerns about news stories that are showing some bizarre changes in insect behaviors.

It sounds like the makings of a creepy movie. Swarms of insects band together and march across the land. They crawl over everything in their path, and they make an eerie rustling sound as they move. Along the way, they eat each other when they get the chance. They also eat crops and wind up in your room and can swarm over you too.

Well, it appears this is happening in parts of Idaho and Oregon. These crickets are known as Mormon or cannibal crickets. They travel in large columns and move across roadways, making roads slippery as cars run over them and slide off of roads.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Animal Plant Health Inspection Service says the bugs actually shielded back katydids, an entomological cousin to grasshoppers, are stretched in a band across southwestern Idaho, concentrated around Winnemucca, Nevada; and sprinkled throughout Oregon, Washington, Montana, Wyoming, Arizona and Colorado.

Here in the Northwest, the weather has been better than usual. The temperatures have been perfect and for about a month now we haven’t had much rain.

This means that I have found myself outdoors a lot more than usual. Just as luck would have it, I have neglected to prepare for what New York Magazine warned about a week ago.

Due to a late Winter and Spring rainfalls and now a relatively dry time, Oregon was warned about the possibility of a mosquito infestation.

State specialists are already seeing mosquitoes in southern, central and eastern Oregon, with the insects spreading to other areas as the heat arrives.

Mosquitoes thrive in heat but they also need water. The females lay their eggs in water. The eggs and larvae can overwinter in freezing temperatures. When the water warms, they hatch and produce more mosquitoes that continue the cycle.

The late snowpack melt has created a lot of water for mosquitoes to thrive in.

I was reacquainted with the mosquitoes when I attended the wedding for my friend, Roger. They ruthlessly attacked me all over; especially, my legs and now I am itching like crazy.

A heavy mosquito season increases the chance of people coming down with a case of West Nile virus. The insects carry the virus and pass it onto humans when they bite. Most people don’t suffer any symptoms but the virus can cause fever and even inflammation of the brain in older people.

When I get mosquito bites I always itch and sometimes, I get a little feverish. I have been battling allergies this summer and the mosquito bites don’t help much.

Last year, we were told by the CDC that mosquitoes also delivered another disease\and that is the Zika virus. There have been a few outbreaks because of mosquito bites, but luckily it appears that the outbreak was not as big as they foresaw at least not in the United States.

We know now that the outbreak in Brazil has been devastating and there have been many people who suspect that the outbreak was intentional – that genetically modified Frankenbugs were released into the Mosquito population causing the outbreak.

A British biotech company called Oxitec reported they had released genetically modified mosquitoes among the normal mosquito population.

These mutant mosquitoes had many strange traits – one, was they were able to glow red when placed under a microscope and the other was they carried a gene that would cause the offspring of normal mosquitoes to attack one another, causing the weaker normal mosquitoes to self-destruct. The idea was to release male genetically modified mosquitoes that would mate with existing normal females and hatch larvae which would eventually die off.

Many people were afraid that it would change the ecosystem and while the normal mosquitoes would be eliminated, what would the GM mosquitoes do to the environment?

It sounded like a great idea to get rid of pests; however, there was not a lot of data on what would happen when a large population of mosquitoes is taken out of the ecosystem.

Oxitec had admitted their system of introducing mutant pests to the environment wasn’t fool-proof. Oxitec could not guarantee that some of the GM mosquitoes would be female.

It is the female mosquito that sucks the blood from animals and humans.

It was found that one female would be accidentally released for every 1,500 male mosquitoes.

This means that genetically modified females can be released into the ecosystem. These females carry a genetically modified protein in their salivary glands that when introduced into the human bloodstream could very well deliver a force multiplied pathogen or contagion capable of spreading rapidly.

Declassified documents in 1956 and 1958 revealed the US Army let loose swarms of specially bred mosquitoes in Savannah, Georgia and Avon Park, Florida to check whether these insects could be used as a biological weapon.

In 1972 The United states signed the Biological Weapons Convention and President Nixon had ordered Pentagon to stop producing biological weapons in 1969 – obviously, the Presidential directive was not followed. Despite signing the Convention, the United States or rather its intelligence has been toying with different types of bio-chemical “weaponry” – Ebola, Sarin VX nerve gas, Mandrax, deadly lethal injection drugs – Scoline and Tubarine, Paratyphoid, Salmonella, Cholera, Anthrax, Smallpox, highly potent CR tear gas and Dengue Fever.

In 2009, the first set of Oxitec’s genetically modified mosquitoes were released on Grand Cayman, an island in the Caribbean. In 2010, 3 million genetically modified mosquitoes were released. The release was done in secret and back then, there were people that worried about what they might have been exposed to.

The GM-mosquitoes were already released in Malaysia, Brazil, Panama, Singapore, India, Thailand and Vietnam.

Since that time, there was an under-reported a forced multiplied strain of Dengue Fever that was seen in those areas leading some people to believe these genetically modified mosquitoes were being created for population control.

Since the introduction of these GM mosquitoes, the problems they were supposed eradicate got worse. India, Pakistan suddenly began experiencing dengue fever outbreaks, along with Iran. Cambodia and China were also hit by a super-strain of dengue fever, which kills nearly 90% of its victims. Doctors were speculating these strains were created in a lab.

This summer, scientists in California are releasing 20 million mosquitoes in an effort to shrink the population of mosquitoes that can carry diseases. The question is will it backfire?

The project is called Debug Fresno and its being undertaken by another company called Verily, a subsidiary of Alphabet, Google’s holding company. It’s the company’s first field study involving sterile mosquitoes in the U.S.

Scientists say the goal is to cut the population of Aedes aegypti mosquitoes — the species responsible for spreading Zika, Dengue and Chikungunya. A. aegypti have been present in California’s Central Valley since 2013 and have been a problem in Fresno County.

Here is the catch — any and all information about the effects of releases is vague at best. The general lack of accurate available information available before starting releases is disappointing.

Supporters of the GM insects, like Oxitec, claim that those who oppose the idea of GM insect releases are simply fear mongering.

This is currently the same response from the big biotech giants to those who oppose genetically modified foods.

Recently, we have reported that opponents of genetically modified foods have been correct with their concerns, as multiple studies have surfaced over the past couple of years that indicated GMOs can be very harmful to the environment, as well as pose a threat to human health.

It’s no different [than] genetically modified insects, mosquitoes to be exact, they’ve already released into the public without a proper risk assessment.

On July 6, the U.S. Department of Agriculture approved the release of a moth designed to self-destruct in Geneva, New York.

Its mission is to mate with wild diamondback moths, which are an agricultural pest, and produce offspring that will die before reaching maturity. Scientists at Cornell University’s Geneva campus is again working with Oxitech in this endeavor.

Scientists have now installed a genetic “kill switch” in the moths that is triggered while they are still larvae. The moths contain genetic elements from viruses, bacteria, and coral, among other organisms, according to the nonprofit GeneWatch.

Many concerned organizations and individuals are now putting pressure on the New York Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) to halt the release.

The genetic modifications made to the diamondback moth are more complex, as are the potential consequences. Although the USDA’s environmental assessment concluded that there would be no significant impact if the moths were released, groups like Gene Watch have said impacts on local farmers, wildlife, and the wide-reaching food chain could be lethal.

For example, crops would be covered with many more dead larvae than usual. “[The USDA’s environmental assessment] ignores the potential impacts of excessive dead larval remains on the final product and the damage to New York’s reputation if these products are associated with contamination from genetically engineered insects.

The dead larvae will be consumed by many animals. Little is known about the health effects of the killing mechanism, a protein called tTA (tetracycline-controlled transactivator).

There is some evidence that tTA can damage the lungs and brain function of mice, GeneWatch said, yet an Oxitec report declared no adverse impacts have been observed in mice or other animals.

GeneWatch and the nonprofit Center for Food Safety are calling for more transparency and more comprehensive testing, especially feeding studies.

Although the moths are designed to die before reaching maturity, the kill switch doesn’t work 100 percent of the time. Even only 1 percent surviving would mean millions of GM moths surviving and spreading.

An antibiotic called tetracycline disables the kill switch. This allows scientists to breed the GM moth in the lab. Tetracycline is commonly used in animal rearing and is thus found in manure. Enough tetracycline makes it into cat food made from chicken.

Oxitec has developed other insects, including GM fruit flies that are ready for testing but far from being released.

Scientists are creating other, more experimental so-called “franken-bugs.” Howard Hughes Medical Institute has made dragonfly “drones,” which were genetically engineered so that certain neurons would respond to light pulses. The researchers strapped micro-gear on the dragonflies that emitted light pulses, allowing them to control the dragonflies’ movements.

One of the current areas of research reportedly being undertaken in the scientific/military field is the development of micro air vehicles (MAVs), tiny flying objects intended to go places that cannot be (safely) reached by humans or other types of equipment. One of the primary military applications envisioned for MAVs is the gathering of intelligence (through the surreptitious use of cameras, microphones, or other types of sensors); among the more extreme applications posited for such devices is that they may eventually be used as “swarm weapons” which could be launched en masse against enemy forces.

Some efforts in MAV research have involved trying to mimic birds or flying insects to achieve flight capabilities not attainable through other means of aerial propulsion. In 2007 a bug-like MAV model with a 3-cm wingspan was displayed at a robotics conference, in 2008 the U.S. Air Force released a simulated video showing MAVs about the size of bumblebees, and in 2012 engineers at Johns Hopkins University were studying the flight of butterflies to “help small airborne robots mimic these maneuvers.

Some have claimed the U.S. government has not only researched and developed insect-like MAVs, but for several years, has been furtively employing them for domestic surveillance purposes.

However, they can get costly when birds mistake them for real insects and yes some of these insect like drones wind up in spider webs.

For those who are fans of the British TV show, Black Mirror, there is an episode called “Hated in the Nation.”

In the episode, somebody creates a mechanical bee prototype to combat the effects of bees dying. It’s approved by the British government and millions of these bees begin buzzing around the United Kingdom, pollinating flowers that that the dead bees can’t.

A series of mysterious deaths lead British authorities to believe that the bees have been hacked. Well surprise, surprise. Surprise… they have! Also, the government has given the bees facial recognition abilities, because it wants to take advantage of the bee program to spy on British citizens.

It turns out that every British citizen who uses a specific Twitter hashtag (#DeathTo, which is wishing death upon a maligned public figure) will be targeted by the robotic bees. There’s nothing authorities can do; the technology is too far gone. Nearly 400,000 people have tweeted #DeathTo, and the episode ends with precisely 387,000 or so dead bodies.

The bees cause the most painful death imaginable. In fact, the targeted humans end up killing themselves just to end the pain they inflict.

Just thinking about the possibilities makes my mosquito bites feel so insignificant right now.

Written by Ron Patton