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Ecologist Eben Paxton, speaking
on a cell phone from somewhere in one of Hawaii’s forests, wanted to talk about
the scary events happening on the island of Kauai.
The “bird crash,” he calls it.
Hawaii’s
fourth-largest island, says Paxton, a scientist with the U.S. Geological
Survey, is seeing a sudden, rapid decline in native birds.
The prime suspect is avian
malaria. It’s being spread by mosquitoes and it kills rare birds such as
the ‘i’iwi, a bright red honeycreeper with a curvy Dr. Seuss beak. Surveys
carried out on the island’s rugged, roadless interior are finding fewer birds
than ever before. Extinction for some species looks imminent.
So now a group of government
officials, conservationists, and scientists in Hawaii are seriously looking at
a high-tech solution: genetically modified mosquitoes.
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