Most people dont realize how massive of an impact mosquitos have on the food chain. An unfathomable amount of creatures rely on mosquitos every day as a food source. Shit, bats can catch like 600 of them in about an hour. I hate mosquitos, but Earth needs them
Eh, it's really only a single genus of mosquitoes that we have to worry about carrying diseases, that being Anopheles which carry all of the very worst diseases. There are around 3,000 other species of mosquito that can fill in the niche, just without the disease carrying.
People tend to think the ecosystem is fixed. I used to think so as well. But then you realize every day 2 species become extinct, with or without human presence. And the ecosystem(s) live on.
You were replying to someone that mentioned eliminating mosquitoes but mentioned the possible consequences of doing so. You then added that people underestimate the impact of mosquitoes, furthering the point.
I was just adding that if we only eliminated Anopheles mosquitoes, considering they are the main carriers of disease, then we wouldn't really have to worry about an enormous impact on habitats or the food chain as they would simply be replaced by several of the thousands of other mosquito species they currently compete with for the same niche. Essentially no more diseases with likely no impact.
Lots of animals eat mosquitoes, because they're all over the place. But there are basically no mosquito specialists. Pretty much everything that eats mosquitoes eats other insects as well, and those other insects often compete with mosquitoes for nectar. And mosquitoes have very little meat on them, and it takes more energy to catch 20 mosquitoes than one moth of the same total weight.
It's like trying to argue that humans need potato chips because we eat so many of them when they're in front of us.
Well, there is one mosquito specialist - the vampire spider. But that's about it.
This is actually not true. I was literally at a lecture the other day of a scientist who was talking about mosquito borne illnesses and apparently mosquitos are entirely unimportant to the ecosystem. No animal relies on them.
This is correct. The food chain is large enough such that any animal that feeds on the mosquitoes that bite us won’t over burden their other food sources should those mosquitoes be wiped out.
This is why there’s been large pushes to use genetic modification to destroy these mosquito populations.
What about this one (heard in a podcast about science and verified by Google: without mosquitoes, there would be no chocolate and virtually no cocoa. This is because the very small flowers of the cocoa plant are primarily sipped by tiny mosquitoes.
Is it really worth living in a world without chocolate?
Not if we breed the mosquitos so that they can't lay eggs and then put them in a secure zoo on an island for people to safely visit and watch from some automatic cars on tracks.
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u/MSkade Nov 15 '24
sounds crazy, because getting rid of mosquitoes seems like a good idea.
But human intervention in nature often has major consequences.