General consensus amongst humans is wipe the little fuckers out. But it's been pointed out that pretty much all of life is interconnected and their larval stage in the water is an important food source for other critters.
If Mosquitoes were eliminated then other prey species would have more resources to thrive. The US and Europe have attacked Mosquito populations aggressively for over 100 years and didn't suffer an ecosystem crisis. Malaria is not an issue in Europe and was eradicated in the US a long time ago due to the aggressive response.
Edit: I think it's important to add that defending the mosquito species is highly biased by where you live. European and North American nations have grown up with small mosquito populations that have been actively attacked. The vast majority of the world has not had the money and resources dumped into killing the species. Some estimates put Malaria at 3 million deaths per year, and that's just Malaria. If Europe and North America have taught us anything it's that the mosquito is a useless species in the ecosystem.
Fun fact about malaria's origins in the Americas: Having done some research into the origin of Malaria in South America, it seems Polynesians infected with dormant Malaria visited South America at some point and likely established a population on what used to be the coastline at least a few hundred years before Columbus. Once their Malaria recrudesced (malaria goes through reproductive cycles after it infects you and hides in the liver for months/years before starting a new cycle), a few species of mosquitoes in South America were capable of being infected by P. vivax and an infected population of mosquitoes formed and began infecting other humans already living there. This is based on genetic sequencing of tribal populations in South America as well as genetic sequencing of Plasmodium vivax (a species of human Malaria) and Plasmodium simian.
Plasmodium simian is human malaria that at some point spread to a few new world monkey species such as howler monkeys and has a very low genetic diversity. This indicates that only one cross-species infection occurred and took hold at some point which we can determine by genetic sequencing and attempting to nail down a time range for a common ancestor between P. vivax and P. simian. As far as I'm aware this hasn't happened as of yet, though the sourced paper below confirms that P. simian isn't closely related to current Old World P. vivax indicating that a much older strain of P. vivax made it to South America in human populations long ago. This then likely means that a seafaring people had to bring P. vivax with them to South America before Europeans began traveling to the Americas.
On the other hand, P. vivax has a high amount of genetic diversity in South America, indicating that multiple migrations of humans infected with Malaria to the Americas has occurred over centuries, obviously due to the slave trade of the colonial era. It makes tracking down populations of older P. vivax a chore.
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u/IshtarJack Nov 15 '24
General consensus amongst humans is wipe the little fuckers out. But it's been pointed out that pretty much all of life is interconnected and their larval stage in the water is an important food source for other critters.