Why Singapore Is breeding millions of mosquitoes

This article was originally featured on Undark.

At Singapore’s National Environment Agency, more than a million mosquitoes buzz inside plastic boxes in a breeding room that smells of fermented sugar. The male insects, which don’t bite, feed on plant juices in the wild, but here, they nourish themselves on sugar water. Meanwhile, their female counterparts lay eggs on paper-like strips half submerged in trays of water. Each week, the insects inside this facility produce 24 million tiny black eggs.

The NEA’s mosquitoes are all Aedes aegypti, a species that can transmit…