I Released 40 Million Mosquitoes. I Still Felt Small.

The drone whirred overhead, scattering millions of lab-raised mosquitoes—my months of work, gone in seconds, lost in the wind over Maui. We say it’s for the honeycreepers, for the ecosystem, for the future. But standing in the field, watching the swarm disappear, I wondered if any of it mattered. I’ve read the papers. I know the numbers. But I also know how it feels to watch a species fade, to write another grant just to keep going, to rerun the same protocol because the first four didn’t work. The mosquitoes don’t care about my exhaustion. The birds don’t know my name. Sometimes I think the only thing evolving here is my ability to keep pretending I’m not tired. No one tells you how much hope it costs to keep releasing things into the world, not knowing if they’ll ever come back. #Science #ScienceFatigue #LabBurnout