Why would scientists wish to pack mosquitoes into a syringe? To ship them in the mail, of course.
One method of population reduction is the sterile insect technique, wherein infertile male yellow fever mosquitoes are introduced into a wild population.
In theory, they still do everything fertile males do, like mate, with the key difference that no offspring come from their unions.
Only females suck blood and spread disease, so the infiltration of these impotent males does nothing but create more competition for members of the species that would otherwise proliferate.
But the mosquitoes need to be specially bred in a lab.
Scientists need to know how to ship the insects from the lab where they’re created to the wild populations they’re meant to breed with.
It's a strange question, but oddly enough one of a type that many of the researchers I have worked with ask quite often in pursuit of bigger goals. In this case, it's how well do mosquitoes survive in low oxygen environments for the purpose of being able to ship them in the mail. The idea being that a batch of genetically engineered mosquitoes that are sterile may be shipped globally to muck up the population of mosquitoes in an area, reducing their numbers.
These questions are fascinating as the idea of reducing mosquito populations is the up high abstract goal, but the nuts and bolts of how to do that give rise to a number of logistical questions and experimental questions like these.
To be honest, my first assumption was they were planning on injecting people with mosquitoes.
