Comment by vlod
7 hours ago
Isn't there a knock on effect of removing them?
Does anything eat them as food? Wouldn't it be environmentally damaging to remove a source of food for X?
7 hours ago
Isn't there a knock on effect of removing them?
Does anything eat them as food? Wouldn't it be environmentally damaging to remove a source of food for X?
Mosquitoes control human populations, an invasive species. Removing mosquitoes will make humans proliferate, which is known to be environmentally damaging.
Joking aside, the consensus seems to be that the effect of removing disease-carrying mosquitoes (not all mosquitoes) from the environment is minor compared to how many lives it can save.
Aedes aegypti is an invasive species native to Africa so removing it from the environment everywhere else in the world that it has been spread to would benefit the local mosquito species which don't spread the same diseases and are less of a nuisance to humans.
Lots of animals eat mosquitos, but they really aren't the primary food source of any species, especially this particular type of mosquito. It would have a very minimal effect on food supply.
There are still a lot of other mosquito species. removing just the few that carry human disease will not have a major impact on creatures that eat mosquitoes.
The mere existence of other things that we call mosquitos does not mean they are all interchangeable as a food source for the animals that eat them.
Is your level of knowledge on this just "there are other things called mosquitos ergo it's not a problem," or do you have deeper affirmative knowledge that the animals that eat these mosquitos also eat those other mosquitos, and that those other mosquitos can increase their population to replace the lost food source?
Most things that eat mosquitoes are actually in the business of eating any flying insect that fits in their mouth. I'd be a bit more worried about, e.g. a species being the only pollinator for some plant, but that's pretty unlikely. Do the studies, sure, but don't expect any bombshells. And if aedes aegypti or any of the other big disease-causing mosquitoes had such a role, I'm pretty sure it would have already been found and trumpeted to the heavens.
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In places where it's been living for hundreds of years, that's a legitimate concern.
In Europe though, where aedes aegypti didn't exist 20 years ago, it's probably the other way around: what did the introduction of this new species damage? (apart from making the summer unbearable outside if any of your neighbour isn't very strict with standing water elimination)
There isn’t, but why would I care?
A billion human lives, or some sad trout who have to eat fruit flies instead. For me, it’s an obvious choice.
I just can’t understand the level of smugness it must take to insist that we must force another billion people to die of horrible diseases like malaria, because you want the moral high ground. How do you even tell yourself that killing all those people is the moral high ground?
Your saying we do things that save human lives, irrespective of the outcome? Let's start by removing cars [0], that would save ~37K people.
Yeah, it gets a bit silly real fast. I've never been accused for forcing a billion to die, so thanks for that.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_fatality_rate_in...
> "Your saying we do things that save human lives, irrespective of the outcome?"
In fact, no, they did not say that. They said that the considered balance of the merits strongly favors eradicating the 2% of mosquito species that carry human diseases for someone who gives greater weight to the benefit of saving a billion human lives[0] than to the cost of some trout eating the thousands of other mosquito species instead.
[0] - 700 million contracted mosquito-borne illnesses each year worldwide. Death isn't the only consequence of significance.
I believe the argument is the dominant mosquito species are themselves invasive to the continent
"Invasive" is a made up human concept. The question is whether there are species that now rely on these as a food source. The entire natural world is a hodge-podge of "invasive" species coming from some nearby land, disrupting the ecosystem, then the ecosystem evolving around it – typically a gradual process over thousands of years.
If it took a couple hundred years for this species to proliferate, it's absolutely plausible that eradicating it in a few years will have surprising second- and third-order effects.
“Invasive” is a useful concept to describe species that spent millions (sometimes hundreds of millions) of years evolving in one environment and then moving to a new one in the last few thousand years.
Do you understand that time scales are important here?
There are also species that have invaded areas that are totally impossible for them to reach without seafaring or airfaring human civilizations to carry them.
All terms are made up. Some are useful and some are not. This one is useful.
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Are you proposing that it would be infinitely bad? That somehow extincting a few varieties of mosquitoes could cause the collapse of all life on earth?
I don't get the "but what if it's somewhat - not infinitely - bad" argument? The known good is so dramatically good that we'd need a shocking amount of unknown bad to have made it not worth it. But if I'm choosing between mosquitoes, and say... fish, frogs, and a variety of birds, yes, get rid of the mosquitoes.
I am merely suggesting we don't really understand the consequences and things may not be as simplistic that everyone thinks. i.e. kill "bad guy" mosquitos, save a billion people.
We start spraying crops so we can end world hunger (or just make more money) and screwing around with other things and now we're killing bees and other things. This will ultimately come to haunt us.
The death of all bees would count as infinitely bad (in terms of crop pollination) and we're doing a very good job in making that happen.
There are many mosquito species in competition for the same resources, only a few (iirc 10% in the US) of which sting humans and carry diseases. Wiping out the ones that attack people would allow other mosquitoes to take over the ecological niches.
The swallows love mosquitoes. When I get bit by mosquitoes I often joke I am feeding the birds.
What's the ratio of frogs lives to human children spared from disease that's acceptable to you, assuming we had a clear answer?
If 20,000 humans weren't significantly harmed from disease because of this release, but 70,000 frogs faced starvation, which would you choose?
I was suggesting that it's rarely that simple.
If we lose those frogs, it most likely would cause a cascade across other species. There are lots of things that eat frogs.
I'm not a fan of "you never know" arguments.
They're only applied to thing we don't want to do.
In reality, it's always true that we don't fully know, so applying the argument always means "let's not do this".
I totally understand there's a massive amount of unknowns about this. Let's continue analyzing what's the right course of action as we go, and ensure we're taking that understanding into account of what we do in the future.
In the end, whose lives do you prioritize given the lack of information today, and the lives at risk today? Deciding to do nothing still costs lives, and potentially drives us further into the bad state area.