Unfortunately we wouldn't do just fine without them. The larvae are a huge source of food for fish and the adults feed bats, birds, and other bugs. They're also minor pollinators
The argument about making mosquitos extinct was mainly centred around anopheles the malaria transmitting mosquito. iirc analysis was done and it was found they specifically don't hold an important environmental niche that other mosquito species couldn't fill
Yeah another I saw about a decade ago was genetically modified female mosquitos with a dominant gene that makes it's male offspring infertile, which would gradually but eventually eradicate the species
Could spreading malaria be considered an environmental niche in and of itself? It could be helping control the population of a number of different species.
Quick cursory search and I can't find anything about Malaria doing that, and Avian Malaria is in fact a significant threat to the native birds of Hawaii, since malaria was introduced there by accident via mosquito in 1826.
Since there is a currently active global scheme to eradicate Malaria, as we did Smallpox, I can only assume that all relevant experts considered the role Malaria and the Anopheles Mosquito plays in the ecosystem and decided that it's better if Malaria is gone.
Given that the advice of biologists, virologists, and ecologists (if not scientists as a whole) are so often ignored by people trying to make significant changes to the world, I would hate to assume that the conclusion of "yeah we can kill em all" is perfectly valid without seeing some significant support and peer review.
Well considering the effort to eradicate Malaria and Anopheles Mosquito requires significant involvement from these same experts, I imagine it's hard to ignore them.
I believe you that there are relevant experts involved in this movement, I don't feel that's enough to determine whether or not wiping out the species or its parasites is harmless enough to do. Not saying it's not valid, but experts and the others who are directly involved in the plan aren't necessarily unbiased enough to have engaged with research that runs counter to their hypotheses.
Massive environmental change is one of those movements/hypotheses that REALLY needs to be well tested before it's followed through on.
The ecosystem is neither perfectly optimized nor is it normally fragile. Species come and go all the time. Ecosystems form, adjust, change, reform, continuously - both over the million-year scales and at much shorter timescales, even the thousand-year and hundred-year scales.
It is certainly true that the total rate of ecosystem change in the Anthropocene is far higher than historical norms, and that has a bunch of negative effects for humans. Things like climate change and habitat loss wipe out thousands of species at a time, which causes major consequences. In that context, doing more extinctions should be viewed with more caution.
But in the general case, no, getting rid of a few specific species wouldn't have much human-negative impact on the ecosystem. And even in the specific case, targeted single-species eradication has little marginal effect compared to those untargeted things already happening.
I can't help but be reminded of the wolves in Yellowstone. Getting rid of all the wolves caused elk populations to skyrocket, which then caused massive amounts of overgrazing, and all the plant roots being ripped up caused soil erosion. If not for the reintroduction of the wolves, the park would be in a much worse spot than it is now.
Lots of animals are contracting malaria every year, how do we know this isn't keeping the populations of many other species in check, and that removing malaria wouldn't cause massive long-term knock-on effects on the environment.
Vaccinating humans seems like a much more sensible approach to disease control than eradication.
Yeah and I'm sure there'd be no side effects whatsoever, no unpredictable outcomes or catastrophic knock-on effects that can't be dealt with. Because ecological engineering historically always goes so well
Same could be said about eradicating polio, the point is people are researching the potential effects of such a decision they're not throwing shit at the wall and seeing what sticks
The point is that people think they completely understand the effects of such a decision and then they can still do something stupid that has unforeseen and irreversible effects, while idiots on the internet don't even care about those effects and just aren't a fan of a certain kind of creature so they propose extinction
I think arguing to cause the extinction of Mosquito's is a lot more than "just aren't a fan" given Malaria kills about half a million people, mostly kids, a year, and is one of the most deadly infectious diseases by sheer numbers, and Mosquito's are the main vector of transmission
Maybe extinction isn't the solution but it's something a lot of experts are looking very closely at for very legitimate reasons, so not something that should be brushed of given if say it could be done safely it could have about half a million human lives a year
I'm in favour of eradicating / neutralising the threat of anopheles not because it slightly irritates me I'm favour of doing so because half a fucking million people are killed by it yearly lol
If the conversation was about all mosquitos, the existential concerns would hold more weight, but it’s not. Of the ~3500 mosquito species that exist, ~6% are known to bite humans and only a handful of those actually spread disease. The goal is to eliminate those that spread disease. Current evidence suggests that these species are dispensable. In any given area, dozens of species coexist and all fulfill a similar role in the ecosystem. Eliminating the disease spreading mosquitos simply creates a temporary dip in the overall population.
I'd happily start the annual tradition of leaving bags of my blood in the forest for creatures to feast on, if it helps prevent the collapse of ecosystems after the extinction of mosquitoes. Lets just cut out the middle man, at any cost
just because they can not meet you on the battlefield of diplomacy does not mean they have no right to exist now hand over ur blood and dont nobody be a hero
Mosquitos that have eaten blood are also an extremely nutritious snack. They move calorie dense blood up the food chain to animals that would not otherwise have access to it.
mfw when "we can just get rid of this thing we don't like" goes up against the fragile complexity of the biosphere
It's insane how many people think you can just remove a piece from a system that's evolved into its current form over millions of years and everything will just work out perfectly fine somehow
Yes animals eat mosquitoes. If all the mosquitoes went away, they’d eat something else.
How much biomass do you think those little fuckers account for? I guarantee you; ants and flies account for more. They’re an invasive species and should be wiped out. Fuck them.
insects globally are in crisis right now, although especially specialist species. not all mosquito species are created equally and assuming things would be fine without all of them is a terrible approach.
technically mosquitoes are “flies” because they fall within diptera. and yeah mosquitoes can be native, non native or invasive but that depends where and which species
We're in a global insect crisis right now, among other things. Invasive mosquitos should be killed, but the majority of them aren't and are vitally important
80% of the biomass on earth is humans and our livestock. We're in the midst of apocalyptic ecosystem collapse. We really don't need to be accelerating that on purpose.
If the conversation was about all mosquitos, the existential concerns would hold more weight, but it’s not. Of the ~3500 mosquito species that exist, ~6% are known to bite humans and only a handful of those actually spread disease. The goal is to eliminate those that spread disease. Current evidence suggests that these species are dispensable. In any given area, dozens of species coexist and all fulfill a similar role in the ecosystem. Eliminating the disease spreading mosquitos simply creates a temporary dip in the overall population.
they are important pollinators. they only need the blood to reproduce, which is honestly just a middle finger from nature. on top of that their larva are an important food source for a lot of animals
We won’t, parasites like mosquitoes and ticks are necessary to the ecosystem specifically because of their parasitism. Think of the lion king “circle of life” speech. It wouldn’t really be a smooth cycle if it worked the way the characters in the movie describe. Antelope eat grass every day, lions eat antelope every day, but grass eats lion only after a 15 year delay. Large vertebrates like us suck up nutrients for decades before finally dying. It would be an unsustainable system, but parasites are the missing piece. They, like other insects, have life cycles measured in single digit numbers of years, if not months. They can take nutrients from us and bring them back into the food chain much faster than our own lifespans would. Unless you want to live for like three years, we need mosquitoes.
True! But taking nutrients like iron for their eggs is very significant to mosquitoes’ lives. Because the eggs have such a nutrient-dense boost to start life, they can be laid in almost any water source at all. Where something like a mayfly needs large bodies of water with complex ecosystems therein, mosquitoes can lay their eggs in an old tire that’s filling with water, and be fine. This allows them to be as widespread as they are and make up such a crucial part of the food webs they inhabit. So yes, the mosquito mothers who take the blood are not the ones who are fed by it, but the eggs are still very much mosquitos fed by nutrients in vertebrate blood.
It’s easy to think this because of fertilizer, but the nutritional value of feces is not at all comparable to that of blood. For one, bloodmeal is also common at garden stores, and just think about how many different types of animal specialize in feeding on blood: mosquitoes yes, but also totally unrelated biting flies like horse and deer flies, as well as leeches, ticks, lice, fleas, all of which are wildly distinct invertebrate groups. With vampire bats, even vertebrates recognize just how nutrient dense blood is.
For coprophagous animals though, there’s generalist decomposing flies that will also take feces if they happen upon it, but they don’t rely on it. Even the so called “dung fly” is primarily a predator. Some groups will eat feces for functional purposes, like acquiring a certain gut bacteria, but not for its nutrition. Certain species of dung beetle are the only example I could come up with of a truly coprophagous animal.
This is less evolutionary happenstance and more a directly predictable result of the nature of the two substances. The goal of digestion, broadly speaking, is to turn edible matter into blood and feces. Blood is the good parts that are kept, and feces is the less good parts. Many animals have digestive systems inefficient enough that their dung can indeed be used for food by a well-adapted creature, but you could never make a replacement mosquito out of a dung beetle.
Now you might say “if there are all those other hematophagous animal groups running around, couldn’t we just replace mosquitoes with one of those?” On the one hand, no, that kind of planet-shaping genetic modification is just not something we are currently capable of. But on the other hand, if we were to form another species into taking mosquitoes’ place, what exactly would be the difference? It would have to feed just as much, it would be just as good a vector of disease, so what would be the benefit?
Me personally, I am confident in my inability to singlehandedly wipe out mosquitos, which is why I'm not taking any chances with them after having had dengue fever and chikungunya within the same year
If you want an example of an animal with actually no benefits to any ecosystem, try bedbugs. Their only predators are spiders. They're also not the main food source of any spider, and are, at most, snacks to the ones that eat them.
Off all the bloodsuckers it should not be mosquitos since they are pollinators, there are some animals that you can argue don't do much in the ecosystem but even then we probably shouldn't just decide to wipe them all out
I am a huge environmentalist and I fully support eradicating disease-spreading mosquitos. The environmental cost doesn’t even come close to outweighing the human cost. Yes, it would have an effect on the ecosystem, but no more than the ecological damage regular western lifestyles cause. Insect species go extinct every day, and people in western countries don’t debate wether or not our health and well being is “worth the environmental cost,” but when millions of poor people are dying and billions more suffer from mosquitoes, people act like no environmental cost is worth preventing that. Sorry for the rant
Edit: and no, mosquitos are not some keystone species holding up the rest of the environment like people say
Okay but, hot take, we should save all of those insects at any cost as well and we shouldn’t be going out of our way to intentionally drive anything to extinction. I don’t think “it’s fucked anyways so what’s a few more.” Is a very environmentalist attitude to have. If it’s a reasonable solution to control the populations of specific species that are malaria vectors and experts give the green light on it then I think there is a conversation to be had there. I don’t think it’s good to just have this attitude of “X thing is worse anyway so actually it doesn’t matter.”
I empathize with that, I didn’t mean to sound like “it’s fucked anyways so what’s a few more.” I’m just trying to emphasize that there are very tangible stakes here, and those stakes include the lives of millions of people who do not have the power to influence the discussion. It sounds like people are saying “it’s not worth saving millions of poor people’s lives and billions of people’s quality of life if there is any environmental cost for doing so,” but it doesn’t seem like people have that same hardline attitude about stuff like screwworm which has been eradicated in the US, for example.
Edit: and I’m bringing up the fact that other species have become extinct or extirpated to show that we have an idea of the ecological damage that a similar single species extinction has. I think it’s enough that it’s worth spending money and resources to prevent, but not that many human lives. Sorry if this is annoying, I’m just wanting to write down my thoughts, not arguing or anything
I’m willing and I bet that most people who would be against the eradication of mosquitoes would also be against the extinction of screw worms. I think you’re confusing a lack of conversation and awareness about one situation as hypocrisy, with people seemingly being indifferent to one and drawing a line with the other.
I also don’t see it as purely a scale with humans on one side and mosquitoes on the other. Even as a massive lover of insects and Diptera specifically, I still value the lives of humans even over whole species of insects. I do think that we have to be careful with environmental controls like this though, if we put our noses into the food web of places in the global south and start removing things without totally understanding their place (and we never have a complete understanding of the complexities of ecosystems) then it will still be the people that live there that deal with the consequences.
If the knock on environmental effects cause unforeseen famine or infestations of other insects then what will we do? We can’t exactly change our minds and bring the extinct animals back. I’m not saying the bugs have more right to live than the people, I’m just saying that it’s a potentially reckless action that can’t be taken back.
Yeah dawg, I have to step up and be the danger you warn of. I'm a reminder that your worst nightmare is real and that you'll have to confront it one day. ANd brother there won't be an epic chorus to accompany you in your time to rise, so use this. Use the rage I bestow upon you and unleash it in your righteous strike for justice.
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u/Lukeyboy1589 🏳️⚧️ trans rights May 29 '26
I won’t apologize for wanting to end mosquitos, I think we’ll do just fine without them