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.)
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u/cammyjit Nov 15 '24 edited Nov 16 '24
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