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Project Update
Aloha mai kākou,
Saving Hawaiʻi’s native forest birds has required urgency, innovation, and a willingness to adapt. As of March 2026, Birds, Not Mosquitoes (BNM) has paused its use of the Incompatible Insect Technique (IIT) in Hawaiʻi. This decision was made after extensive review of scientific data collected over the project’s three-year lifespan, which showed this one tool was not suppressing the mosquito populations enough to keep the birds safe. We’ve taken great care in assessing the data, and what we’ve learned from conservation IIT is already informing how we move forward. As we work to protect Hawaiʻi's precious manu from introduced avian malaria, our focus is now exploring alternative tools that are currently available as well as advancing future solutions that can operate effectively across our landscapes.
While this is not the outcome we had hoped for, it is an important part of the scientific process and an opportunity for further research and refinement.
An Application of an Established Technique:
BNM’s use of IIT in Hawai‘i represented a major scientific milemark: it was the first time this technique had been developed and deployed specifically for conservation purposes.
IIT has a long history of success in human-health applications, particularly in urban and suburban environments. In those settings, IIT has successfully suppressed mosquito populations and reduced mosquito-spread diseases like dengue. Adapting the technology to protect Hawaiʻi’s native forest birds on a vast, remote landscape scale presented an entirely new set of challenges.
For BNM, we are targeting the southern house mosquito (Culex quinquefasciatus), a species that is considerably more difficult to work with than some of the mosquito species targeted by successful human-health IIT programs.
We are also operating in a fundamentally different environment. Rather than relatively accessible urban and suburban landscapes, conservation IIT in Hawaiʻi required us to work across rugged and densely forested ecosystems.
Hawai‘i’s forest environments introduce a wide range of variables that are difficult to control or even simulate successfully in a lab. Seasonal rainfall influences mosquito breeding and dispersal. Forest structure and terrain affect how mosquitoes move across the landscape. Wild mosquito behavior and sexual selection could influence how successfully incompatible males compete with wild males.
In laboratory trials on the southern house mosquito, the technique showed promise. But translating those results from controlled environments into Hawaiʻi’s complex montane forests has proven much more challenging.
Why Did We Pursue Conservation IIT When it Had Never Been Used This Way Before?
The short answer is because our birds can’t wait. The longer answer is that, while we understood that there would be challenges, IIT offered a promising new pathway for suppressing mosquitoes across the large, remote landscapes where our native forest birds live. Avian malaria poses an urgent and unprecedented threat, and addressing it requires tools capable of operating at a landscape level scale- including the adaptation of IIT to a conservation use. Even without a guarantee of success, the potential for IIT to fill this critical gap made it essential to explore. Developing, testing, and deploying this new conservation application was a necessary step toward giving our forest birds a fighting chance.
The Scientific Process:
Science is an iterative and evolving process where what we learn informs our next steps. It’s important that we carefully analyze our results, including the challenges, to better apply IIT and other mosquito suppression techniques while we fight to save our native forest birds. While we wish conservation IIT had been a “slam dunk”, it’s unsurprising that there are complex environmental factors at play that need to be better understood for the technique to be more effective.
To clarify, we are pausing, not abandoning, conservation IIT. Our commitment to data-driven science means that we will continue to investigate and innovate toward making conservation IIT an even more effective tool for addressing mosquito-spread disease.
Additionally, the work that was undertaken and the project’s many accomplishments, from mosquito rearing to deployment, are significant. The research, field work, funding support, and data will continue to contribute to bird conservation and mosquito suppression efforts in Hawaiʻi and elsewhere. One of the beautiful things about science is that researchers build on the work that came before them. Even results that fall short of the original goal can provide critical information about what works, what does not, and what needs to change.
The Birds Cannot Wait:
Most importantly, BNM remains fully committed to saving our native birds. Their plight, even within just these last three years, has grown increasingly dire. As we have always said, conservation IIT is one tool in the toolbox to suppress mosquitoes across a landscape scale. What is clearer now than ever before, is that the birds cannot wait for a ‘silver-bullet’ solution, and we need to continue to be proactive in their conservation. So while we pause and research further into IIT in Hawai‘i, we are continuing to focus on additional methods to save species including the application of BTi (a naturally occurring soil bacteria that targets mosquito larvae), captive care, habitat restoration, and translocation of imperiled birds to safer places. Our efforts also includes looking into future innovations as the science evolves.
We will continue to follow the science, learn from the data, support innovation, and pursue every responsible avenue available to protect Hawaiʻi’s unique and irreplaceable native birds.
Mahalo nui loa to everyone who has supported this work—our scientific partners, funders, field teams, communities, and everyone who has followed this effort and cared about the future of Hawaiʻi’s manu nahele.
There is still much work to do. And we are not giving up.
He aliʻi ka ʻāina, he kauā ke kanaka.
The land is chief, and the people are its servants.