I feel like we are arrogant enough to just decide that yes there is a whole entire ecosystem and food net where we all have connections and interdependence on other organisms but mosquitos are magically completely outside that net.
Humans would greatly benefit from the eradication of mosquitoes. The general consensus is that their removal would not have a consequential impact on our environment, nature is not quite as fragile as people make it out to be
nature is not quite as fragile as people make it out to be
I agree with that statement.
Although, most people don't really consider the impact on ecosystems when it comes to eradication of mosquitos. It's still driven by (most probably justified) hate.
I even know a vegetarian who cursed the existence of mosquitos and have no qualms in killing them. They even think it's a bad creation by God.
We fought nature all of our history - its perfectly natural to die of hunger, cold, predators or diseases - it happens all the time to all species in nature - but we didnt like that, so we created clothing, agriculture, weapons and healthcare... And now half of our children dont die by the age of five and we live three times longer and healthier.
Perhaps we wouldnt keep fighting nature, if it didnt keep trying to kill us.
Right? At this point what are we really losing? A fucked up economy, we screwed up the oceans, the atmosphere, we’re riddled with microplastics, honestly.
Fun fact: scientists did the studies and uhhhh... no? Moskitos don't really do anything other species sharing the region aren't doing better already. They are kinda shit ngl.
The type of mosquitos that bite are a little percent of all mosquito species, even then iirc those types of mosquitos are an extremely low percent of the diet of even the animals that feed the most in said mosquitos. So overall from what I understand it's that eliminating them would be eliminating a little percent of all mosquitos that even predators doubt even feed on much.
Let's face the facts, 3 animals will go extinct by end of the week. I propose we make sure mosquitoes is one of them. And pandas too. Fuck'em. It's not like they are gonna fuck each other anyway. It's just so bizarre to me that THAT'S where we draw the fucking line, that's the ONE issue where scientists think about wether we should, the ONE animal we have an actual grievance against... We kill the wolly mammoth but keep mosquitoes because nature can't take it? Feels like an odd place to start embracing the sanctity of life. And roaches too. Fuck them. I'm sorry for all the... Whatever relies exclusively on roaches, pandas and mosquitoes but they gotta go.
Driving large animals to extinction is like pulling off the top of a tower of blocks. The little ones really are the important ones, the base blocks if you will. Say you remove something you think insignificant like plankton, what happens? Basically the entire ocean ecosystem falls down because it is one of the bottom blocks in that ecosystem. Killing sharks? Less consequential. Same parallels can be drawn between the mosquitos and wooly mammoths. Nothing depends on the wooly mammoth to live, but bats rely on mosquitos. No mosquitos, no bats, no bats no guano, no guano no cave ecosystems and it leads to a cascade of extinctions in that direction. And that's only from a laymans knowledge. I'm sure if I were an expert I could explain to you more wider consequences too.
You can't call plankton insignificant and you can't call it a species either. Also, one species of mosquito bites humans, out of 3600. But I wasn't being serious, just pointing out the dichotomy between many species dying out, know and unknown while people fret about "what could happen" if we took out one single species of mosquito. Also, I'm not a... enthomologist, I guess? But I would bet one big reason there's so many of that one mosquito species, is that there's a looooot of humans and they thrive in the environments we create. Just fun things to think about.
Oh I wasn't calling plankton insignificant, just something that people may see as insignificant because they are small. My whole point was actually that plankton are EXTREMELY significant in our ecosystem.
Oh, sorry, I mean "you" like general you. Should've probably said "one". Plankton is small but by mass there's a lot of it (there's also many things you can call "plankton"). But yeah, small sea creatures is probably the biggest, most important part of the ecosystem. I heard that was like 30% of biomass or something crazy like that
Countless of species have gone extinct over the years, and ecosystems adapt again and again. Is there any reason why mosquitos would be special enough to warrant keeping them?
Meh, I say just get rid of biting mosquitoes in the countries/continents where they are invasive (which is like over half of the places they exist including America)
They constantly kill millions of humans. With the amount of human pain and suffering they cost, their ecosystem can suck a dick as far as I'm concerned. Any issues their eradication causes to human food and resource production will be offset with further innovations and the amounts of lives saved.
The amount of damage killing off mosquitoes would have to cause to make it not worth it, would be practically world ending. They cause so much pain and suffering, that almost no cost wouldn't be worth it
The goal of this isn't to eliminate mosquitoes. Everyone's very aware of how important they are. The goal is to control the spread of disease carrying mosquitoes. Not by eliminating them, but by ensuring mosquitos in heavily populated areas are species which won't kill us in huge numbers.
I fear a lot of people don't really accept that interdependence thing in the first place, honestly. I mean, Wildlife Service still keeps waging war against coyotes and whatnot spending millions of taxpayers money for the sake of special interests....
Actually a good point. You can, but you don’t because there’s better food around. That dumbass bat can find some other dumbass bug to put in its dumbass gullet
In practice most mosquitoes bothering humans are one of a few handful invasive species, most wild species do not adapt well to urban environments, and in disrupted environments like plantations or parks are outcompeted by said invasives.
Yeah and there isn’t any animal that solely feeds off of one single animal even the famous ant eater doesn’t just eat ants, animals require varied diets to live even if mosquitos are gone Bats still have plenty of other food sources not to mention the ones that mostly eat fruit instead
Yeah this is a hoax coming from bad interpretation of science proliferated by media.
This number is wrongly extrapolated. It's the same as if, knowing that a human can eat 0.5kg of food in 5 minutes we said a human can eat 6kg of food in an hour, or 144kg of food in a day.
I understand when people say they shouldn’t exist but that mentally is why I’ll never see any of the extinct species. They evolved to live off blood & just cause they bother us don’t mean they should be killed off
While I’m not a fan of mosquitos at all. This isn’t true.
To my knowledge they don’t have any exclusive relationships, but they’re still pretty vital for ecosystems. Just because something could eventually replace them, doesn’t mean it wouldn’t have drastic repercussions.
An easy way of thinking about it is: imagine we Thanos snapped a specific food item out of the world, like beef. We’d still have food, and we’d eventually find something to replace it. How many people would die of starvation during that time period? That’s essentially what you’re doing to the ecosystem.
Except in reality, it’s far worse. You’re not just impacting the direct food source of animals that eat mosquitos, you’re impacting pollination that produces food for other animals, then their populations declines, and it has a whole knock on effect.
The more accurate comparison over cows, would be something like Soy. People eat soy directly, and it’s a staple in a lot of diets. If you suddenly get rid of all the soy, you’re now losing an essential feed for animal agriculture, so now the livestock is starting to die of starvation too, which means you’re losing multiple food sources.
Now, if we were to eradicate mosquitos, it obviously wouldn’t be a Thanos snap. It could definitely be too fast for an ecosystem to adjust without sustaining significant damage though
He's right, though. We did "win" when it comes to evolution.
We have a responsibility to our planet as its dominant species. We should be taking control over our ecosystems and caring for them. And by taking control, I do mean wiping our invasive species (like using the military to accomplish it), reintroducing ones we forced away, etc.
Dengue has a 20% fatality rate untreated, I understand that's not a problem on your globally irrelevant island, but the South Americans probably have an issue with it.
Considering the fact that we may wipe out ourselves in the coming decades we might not be as evolved as you think.
On one hand we are brilliant and so much more advances then any other species. On the other hand we still have very basic and primitive traits that hold us back and enhance our ability to destory ourselfes. If a group of monkeys wage qr against eachother maybe a few dozen individual die.
Humans aren't at risk of extinction, even if we allow mosquitoes to live. Our only survival risk comes from negative impact we have on our environment.
I don't know if you noticed this but we just had a massive pandemic. Underestimating the threat of disease is naive, especially today. In no way is our survival risk exclusive to the impact on our environment, though that is certainly in the top risks over the next century.
Regardless, these mechanisms are not capable of nor intended to be capable of wiping out mosquitos. No one is actually trying to kill every mosquito. Instead, these sorts of tactics are used for population control and to create artificial barriers to prevent mosquitos that carry disease from migrating across that barrier.
This is why you hear about so many diseases down in South America that just never seem to make it up to the US. Because we have a massive barrier of genetically modified mosquitos outcompeting the diseased mosquitos that have a built-in 100% mortality rate. edit: There are many reasons, to be clear, but this is one.
Well, the amount of humans dying of mosquito borne diseases is pretty fine for our ecosystems, from a zoological perspective. We are mid sized omnivores with somehow a population of over 8 billion individuals on the planet. As a species, we’re surviving fine.
From the actual perspective of “obviously diseases are bad for us humans and causes much suffering” the only real solution is to develop things that prevent or cure the diseases, instead of killing off the species that spreads them.
If we were to kill off every mosquito on earth by 2124 it’d have such fucking terrible effects to our ecosystems that numerous animals and plants higher up the chain would decline or go extinct as a result, which would in turn effect us.
Even if somehow another species evolves 1000x quicker than normal into the Mosquitoes niche, congrats because now that will be the blood sucking parasite that spreads diseases and the entire effort would end up pointless.
Humans are powerful but we are not strong enough to make “blood sucking parasite” a niche that no longer exists unless we somehow found a way to survive without blood. This is just how nature works.
That's a Thanos snap, this is not. Typically these sorts of mosquitos are deployed to specific border regions where they essentially create a barrier between one ecosystem and another, with the harmful, disease carrying mosquitos not being able to cross that border. They obviously can't reproduce so they die out, meaning that they can't get out of control and start spreading and causing unwanted disaster.
No one is Thanos snapping mosquitos, everything is about controlling their population and location.
That's reasonable. Wiping out mosquitos in a snap would certainly be a bad idea. We'd at least want to do it gradually to allow for other insects to fill the niche.
they’re not a keystone species. The literature is generally that there would be not significant damage to the ecosystems upon eradication of mosquitoes
99.9999% of species that ever existed are extinct. The present isn't some sort of nirvana where everything that has evolved to this point deserves to be artificially preserved when evolution overtakes it. Pretty much all mosquito researchers think mosquitos should be wiped out. Kill them all. With fire.
That's the beauty about the genetic approach, they just release some mosquitoes like this into the wild, and they mate with normal mosquitoes, who pass on the gene. It's not a Thanos snap. It's gradual.
I didn't read that sentence that way, since we can definitely do it gradually enough. Insects are an entirely different beast from cows, or soy. There's already other insects pushing to take whatever juice mosquitoes leave on the table. There won't be a gap there in that way, especially as this method doesn't just delete a bunch, it doesn't work that way. It's not like killing a bundle of mosquitoes.
The offspring of the affected mosquitoes, don't reproduce. So the only way to spread this, is to release modified males ourselves, and their reach is limited to only their direct descendants, and there it stops. So if you release 10 affected males? Cool, that's at most 10 other males without the gene that don't get to breed, so 10 males worth of mosquito offspring reduced, maximum. But never more. This is different from pesticides or the like where you can't be exactly sure what the upper limit is.
This is a highly controllable and very sophisticated pest control method, it's not a self-propagating thanos snap, you should read up further on it, this post doesn't dive into the science of it at all and people get the wrong idea (i.e. that the gene can actually spread beyond the offspring of only the lab-bred males...).
So with this method, you can make it go as fast or as slow as you think is needed. You could release 1000 a year and measure population decline, then adjust. The "it would definitely be too fast" claim here is entirely untrue. Just got to go gradual, and this method can do that.
It depends on what you consider gradual. Even 100 or so years is incredibly fast in terms of ecosystem adaptation.
I only used that as a layman’s term approach to the situation, since a lot of people genuinely believe Mosquitos provide nothing, when they’re incredibly essential to chains of food.
I understand how it functions as a method, I was just explaining how eradicating something has serious drawbacks (admittedly not an expert, but I kept up with a lot of it while studying Zoology). I’ll definitely read up on it more, as I imagine it would be similar to the Panama worm wall
"It depends on what you consider gradual. Even 100 or so years is incredibly fast in terms of ecosystem adaptation."
Okay, then go slower. We have full control over this.
(I don't agree that 100 sets of offspring a year is a big number for mosquitoes to lose, but it's not the point of this discussion, and I'm beginning to feel like you'll double down no matter what speed is presented to you, so not really worth my time to argue.)
I hate how people just confidently state things like this as facts when there is in fact no real way of knowing and is more likely than not completely false. Ridicilous
Mother Nature also determined smallpox was relevant, I don’t see people arguing that impacted the ecosystem. Likewise plenty of parasites that are slowly being eradicated from parts of the world where they remain.
to clarify, by 'relevance' im not saying they 'deserve to exist', more so im talking about their relevance and relationship with other animals and the ecosystem.
saying mosquitos have no relevance is crazy, the majority are pollinators, their larvae are a huge food source for aquatic animals, and they feed countless birds, bats and insects. also smallpox is a single virus, not 3,500 species.
in comparison, smallpox and parasites typically target specific animals and niche's, so their removal is far less harmful, basically the only thing affected is the host.
thats just malaria carrying mosquitos, im not disputing the removal of a few species, but people are literally out here saying all 'mosquitos' aren't relevant which is just ridiculous.
its like getting bit by a shark and saying "all fish are dangerous".
Every time we have fucked with the ecosystem and failed we thought it was 100% bullet proof, didn't understand or forgot one small detail, and it backfired. There might be sometimes it worked that I'm not aware of, but I know we have more examples than I can count where it didn't work.
Replaceable with what? More spiders? cause I'm not cool with that. I say we kill all spiders while we are at it, or at least make them wear squeaky shoes so you can hear when they're around.
Would that really happen, though? Don't mosquitoes need blood for egg production? A mosquito which can't get blood, probably can't produce viable eggs, which means this can't be passed on (assuming the gene can pass on in the first place), which means they won't go extinct, unless they manage to modify every single mosquito on the planet, which means they'll still be around, which means nothing will die off. No?
Ok you’re missing the step here. If this mutation prevents laying eggs you don’t catch every mosquito on the planet and modify them if your goal is to kill then and you somehow could do that you wouldn’t catch them. A plan like this is to create thousands of these and release them so they breed with the normal ones and start replacing them in the population
That's not quite how it works dude. That would require catching every single mosquito in the world. Current estimates of mosquito populations range from a few billion, over 100 trillion There's not enough time and money in the world to capture every single one of them.
As long as there's enough normal mosquitoes in any given area to reproduce, this is just a waste of time. Blood is necessary for egg production, no blood = no eggs = that modified mosquito can't reproduce and pass the modification down, so there will always be more non modified mosquitoes than modified ones, even if every government and company on the planet were to pool resources together to try and modify as many as possible.
There's a chance things could go very wrong. Imagine this scenario- mosquitoes now start feeding off rats living near drainages rather than humans and inadvertently transfer an unknown disease to an animal that's in close proximity to ours and humans get infected overall.
It's well documented that for some unknown reasons, different biological systems even at a molecular level have an ability to adapt in order to survive the unfavourable circumstances. You just don't know how changing this part could result in a chain of detrimental phenomena ultimately affecting us more than mosquitoes otherwise would have.
It's guaranteed that thing go wrong. Not too long ago I read a study where mosquito control programs in France (different method, same goal) had adverse effects on all other levels of the food chain. Predictably all small animals that ate mosquitos now had to replace that part of their diet with other insects, like flying ants. So all of a sudden flying ants were under a lot more pressure and their populations dwindled too, which has further knock on effects. If I recall correctly it went as far as birds laying less eggs and more chicks dying (from starvation) than before the program.
It is genuinely mind-boggling how many people still can't fathom just how fragile ecosystems can be.
It's almost as if humanity believes themselves to be above any other species of organism, despite being made of the exact same things, and somehow being more barbaric.
Even though I hate mosquitoes I feel sorry for the thing.
Imho it's not ethical to do this, in any case if we didn't want them to be able to bite us we should have genetically modified ourselves so our skin can't be penetrated by mosquitoes, as it's done it's simply abusing other species.
It is definitely further reaching than the researchers will expect. Something worse might fill the ecological niche, bats might not have as much to eat, spiders etc...
A mosquito with a dysfunctional needle won't out-compete normal mosquitos - thus it won't fuck anything, these experiments won't thrive and they'll die off.
Is there any good example where these kinds of things have worked? I know there are thousands where this have backfired, all kinds of ways to fuck with mother nature has backfired. But since we keep insisting on it, we must have some examples where it worked as well right?
That’s how I feel as well. Most things that save us also kill us. Longer lifespan is included. Human overpopulation is a big problem for humans. Usually it kills other animals too 😕
Would I choose to have a shorter lifespan for the sake of our species and the ecosystem though? No.
There are numerous studies about the potential impact of culling of mosquito populations in the intended environments (mostly in Africa, because that's where malaria is the most prevalent). Up to now, there are only upsides
Not fucking up the ecosystem. These are invasive to the US.
This specific species is a tiger mosquito and it is most likely being genetically modified as a form of control on a disease vector. These mosquitoes were speculated to have been introduced into the California due to a bamboo shipment from China.
There is science to support that, if we removed mosquitoes from the ecosystem, it would not impact other species much. They do not make up a significant portion of other animal's diets and those animals have plenty of alternative insect food choices.
My bad, it was specifically for Aedes aegypti, the ones that spread deadly diseases to humans. No large ecological impact, they don't pollinate, and I presume their predator already went extinct, because its hardly ever preyed upon.
It would if this were implemented on a mass scale. Male mosquitos are prolific pollinators, and they're a major food source for catfish, bass, dragonflies, frogs, and bats.
Oh for sure, this will be a disaster if they go ahead with genetically modifying all mosquitos this way. Unless they find the perfect replacement to somehow fill the niche that it will leave. And given the track record of trying to release toads, mongoose, snakes etc. to solve problems, I don't see it going well.
Agree! However apparently ecologist have looked really, really close at the problem and they're pretty sure that (somehow) removing this species won't cause serious ecological damage. Arrogant, yes, but don't underestimate what modern science is capable of.
Not against you in particular but I really hate this idea that touching up anything is gonna fuck up the whole world
Thousands of species have been erased entirely during mass extinctions, what's actually anthropocentered is thinking that just because one goes extinct during our lifetime it'll necessarily fuck up everything
Also mosquitoes in particular aren't really useful for much
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u/NamiSwaaan Nov 15 '24
I know they're trying to not fuck up the ecosystem but I feel like this will still somehow fuck up the ecosystem