The requirement to develop new techniques for insect control that minimize negative environmental impacts has never been more pressing. Here we discuss population suppression and population replacement technologies. These include sterile insect technique, genetic elimination methods such as the release of insects carrying a dominant lethal (RIDL), and gene driving mechanisms offered by intracellular bacteria and homing endonucleases. We also review the potential of newer or underutilized methods such as reproductive interference, CRISPR technology, RNA interference (RNAi), and genetic underdominance. We focus on understanding principles and potential effectiveness from the perspective of evolutionary biology. This offers useful insights into mechanisms through which potential problems may be minimized, in much the same way that an understanding of how resistance evolves is key to slowing the spread of antibiotic and insecticide resistance. We conclude that there is much to gain from applying principles from the study of resistance in these other scenarios – specifically, the adoption of combinatorial approaches to minimize the spread of resistance evolution. We conclude by discussing the focused use of GM for insect pest control in the context of modern conservation planning under land‐sparing scenarios.

Experimental studies of the evolution of reproductive isolation (RI) in real time are a powerful way in which to reveal fundamental, early processes that initiate divergence. In a classic speciation experiment, populations of were subjected to divergent dietary selection and evolved significant positive assortative mating by diet. More recently, a direct role for the gut microbiome in determining this type of RI in has been proposed. Manipulation of the diet, and hence the gut microbiome, was reported to result in immediate assortative mating by diet, which could be eliminated by reducing gut microbes using antibiotics and recreated by adding back We suggest that the evolutionary significance of this result is unclear. For example, in, the microbiome is reported as flexible and largely environmentally determined. Therefore, microbiome-mediated RI would be transient and would break down under dietary variation. In the absence of evolutionary coassociation or recurrent exposure between host and microbiome, there are no advantages for the gut bacteria or host in effecting RI. To explore these puzzling effects and their mechanisms further, we repeated the tests for RI associated with diet-specific gut microbiomes in Despite observing replicable differences in the gut microbiomes of flies maintained on different diets, we found no evidence for diet-associated RI, for any role of gut bacteria, or for specifically. The results suggest that there is no general role for gut bacteria in driving the evolution of RI in this species and resolve an evolutionary riddle.