Hi all,

My team and I are from Imperial College and the Royal College of Art, and we've been working on a concept as part of the Biodesign Challenge - envisaging future applications of biotechnology (i.e. emphasis on plausible near-future applications rather than technology development). We'd love to get some feedback from you the Wildlabs community on our concept.

The basic idea is to helps 'curate' ecosystems automatically, with a smart device that produces species-specific pheromones to produce beneficial outcomes. We are keen to develop some possible scenarios for this, and to do what we can to test the viability (and get feedback on the plausibility) of the overall concept. We've come up with a couple of contexts so far, including:

1) We looked at using this technique to reduce the dominance of signal crayfish in freshwater systems in the UK, for example by repelling the species from certain zones to give other species more of a chance to grow. The pheromones in this case are (according to the literature) fairly well understood, and could likely be produced artificially using a device immersed in the water involving a cell-free system for molecule production. 

2) Another case we have been looking at is that of pollination in a post-bee world. Can we, for example, use airborne pheromones to encourage flies to pollinate fruit trees? (indeed, would we need to use pheromones for this?)

3) Far-future/speculative scenarios might involve splicing pheromone-producing genes into local plant species, to lessen the impact of aggressive/overly dominant species. 

It would be great to have some feedback on the above from the WildLabs community, and whether you can think of any other scenarios and ecosystems that might benefit from species-specific 'curation' in this way. It would be great to have a discussion about the benefits, opportunities and risks.

Looking forward to hearing your thoughts!