What are the risks and benefits of insect birth control through sterilization?

Question

This is a serious question about agriculture please answer it like one or do not at all.Thanks

Answer 1

The first thing that comes to mind is that we can get rid of a bunch of pesky insects that way -- That is a benefit. I guess a risk would be that those insects may serve a purpose in the natural order of things and we would be taking that link out of the chain, which could cause other issues to crop up later.

Answer 2

The idea is to release an overwhelming number of sterile insects, which will then mate with the wild or introduced fertile population.  The fertile population, having already mated, will then not look for new mates, and therefore not produce offspring.

Tried that with medflies.  Two problems:

a) not all the medflies released were actually sterile!

b) the sterilized flies didn't fly as well as the fertile ones, and thus were much less likely to mate at all.