Comment by verelo
4 days ago
My internal dialog can imagine my biologist wife yelling at you already.
Honestly i do not know the full scope of this one, but if there's one thing I've learnt from observing her work over the last decade...it's humans need to stop adding chemicals to water bodies with the goal of thinking they're helping something.
Note it's not a chemical agent; its bacterial spores that infect and kill mosquito larvae! I'm pretty sure they're not harmful to anything that isn't a mosquito, blackfly, gnat, or midge. Though midges are important to pond ecosystems as a source of food for fish and dragonflies and stuff? Idunno, ask this guy's wife.
I will ask her and report back...
I can imagine her having some long explanation about the unknown risks of man spreading this substance, even if its not a chemical agent. I lean on the edge of listening to Grandpa Simpson on these kind of things: https://i.imgur.com/MdjduDH.png
That ship has sailed. We’ve been spraying Bacillus thuringiensis as an agricultural pesticide for a century now, at a massive scale, and that scale probably pales in comparison to how prevalent the organism is worldwide naturally.
I mean, there are unknown risks to having children, to eating, to having mosquitoes around, to pretty much everything.
It is not meaningful to allow every conceivable unknown unknown (to channel Rumsfeld) suck out any sense of agency.
They are dropped from planes by the thousands or millions in Florida and other places, for what that's worth. Between the actual pesticide fogging (back in the day it was DDT) and bacterial controls, they're a big part of the reason that Florida and other southern states don't have malaria any more.
Mosquito dunk is some kind of microbial culture that’s supposed to be safe.
The path to hell is paved with good intentions: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cane_toads_in_Australia
It might well be safe, but the question is what are the downstream affects of reducing the population of mosquitos (or other bugs in the water that this substance impacts). Maybe they've exclusively positive, but I assure you determining that is no walk in the park.
I always find it kind of odd that whenever any thing about reducing mosquitoes come out, you have a ton of people all echoing some variation of: "but what about all the possible effects"?
I don't know, what are the possible effects of antibiotics? What are the possible effects of uprooting weeds, which some organisms may depend on? What are the possible harmful effects of putting out wildfires?
For every action that someone might think of as beneficial, there are all sorts of "harmful" effects that can be posited. In the examples above, these harms are not even just theoretical, and yet people do not constantly wring their hands worrying about wildfire fighting, weed control, or the proper use of antibiotics.
That this seems to happen only with mosquitoes seems quite weird to me, especially when it occurs even with efforts to reduce mosquitoes that spread malaria and other diseases. People are oddly very worried about some nebulous harm caused by reducing real and serious harm now.
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I can see the headline now:
"Mosquito dunks linked to declining bear population - farmers struggling with deer populations"
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The mosquitoes don't exist in isolation though. Isn't this exactly how food chains / ecosystems work? You can't remove a tier without consequences.
It depends. In North America our worst mosquitos (the disease carrying ones) aren't native, they are from the old world. I think everybody would be fine if they were no more.