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Should We Kill All The Mosquitoes? (bbc.com)
If scientists could send Zika-carrying mosquitoes into extinction, should they do it? Several science and business journals are now exploring the question, and Slashdot reader retroworks asks if scientists will ultimately target "not just the most deadly species of the animal, but all 12 species of human-biting mosquitoes in the world, responsible for 500,000 deaths per year."
The headline on today's [paywalled] Wall Street Journal article begs the question, "Why Not Kill Them All...?" [M]ore business journals are exploring private sector investments to eradicate the species of mosquito entirely, [and] most articles seem to find extinction of the indoors-attacking, dengue fever- and malaria-spreading Aedes aegypti a tantalizing prospect...
The BBC weighed the approach more carefully, noting that mosquitoes make rain forests uninhabitable (and consequences of human populations in rain forests are usually disastrous)... Will capitalism make the itch of mosquito bites be forgotten... Forever?
The BBC weighed the approach more carefully, noting that mosquitoes make rain forests uninhabitable (and consequences of human populations in rain forests are usually disastrous)... Will capitalism make the itch of mosquito bites be forgotten... Forever?
The little bastards like the taste of me, but I'd be wary of creating a vacancy that something worse might fill.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
As annoying as mosquitos are, they also serve as a food source for other species. Might be a good idea to figure out where that thread leads before you pull it...
Progressivism: Parasites helping parasites to help themselves - to other people's stuff.
Unfortunately, mosquitoes have no souls.
Corruption is convincing someone that the selfless ideal is the same as their selfish ideal.
I would love not having them around, however be aware that mosquitos are a staple for bats. You have to think about the food chain first before you just go blindly killing all of them.
This is our planet, let us craft it how we want it.
But lacking any humanity it does keep the population down.
Let's kill the rich and all the corporations instead. The planet will thank us.
Kill them all.
What a coincidence! The other day, somebody asked me the same question about Jews!
As long as they don't low-budget the process and take out the honey bees as well...
How many lives do mosquitoes save by migrating virii and enabling human populations to develop immunities?
That's the question I'd ask before thinking about killing them all off.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Why is it worse to send 12 species of mosquitoes to extinction than everything else we've wiped out? We've also put many other species of plants and animals dangerously close to becoming extinct. Why not make it count for something useful? Let's not pretend wiping out a species is unprecedented for humans. We've done that many many times in the past. This one just happens to serve a useful purpose.
Eliminating a major disease or plague raises the same issue we would have if we had no deaths in war. If we did not have a history of millions upon millions dead in war we would have exterminated ourselves with runaway reproduction. Look at Europe in WW2. Some 40 million people perished. If all had lived we would now be dealing with their children, grandchildren and great grandchildren. The number would be quite large. Then we had Stalin butchering tens of millions of people in the Soviet Union. If none of those people had perished we would have a couple of hundred million or more new lives in Europe. So even with 80 million deaths from the war and Stalin Europe still is overburdened with excessive population. Considering that pollution is a consequence of human activity just how awful would life in Europe be if those two somewhat recent problems had not taken place. Global warming and rising seas are posed to take more lives than we have lost in all our wars. The sick truth is that we probably have not had enough war deaths to keep our population at sane levels. Eliminating diseases amplifies the problem and we still have zero social policies to deal with runaway population numbers. Worse yet our political system will not allow any candidate to even mention compulsory birth control.
Without hesitation, yes. Mosquitoes are a literal fucking plague. Remember folks, the headline is shit, but the summary tells the truth- this is about eliminating the species that bite people. There's plenty of mosquitoes that do not do that.
>"If scientists could send Zika-carrying mosquitoes into extinction, should they do it?"
Yes. In fact, any human biting mosquitoes, not just Zika ones. I personally would prefer the "eradicate to NEAR extinction" option and not complete eradication, however... just to be on the super-safe side. And, of course, we would retain frozen/live samples indefinitely. Perhaps eventually we could find a way to change them such that the females do NOT require blood to procreate.
The studies I have read seem to indicate that human-biting mosquitoes do not represent a critical or even major link in the food chain for other creatures. They are also very minor pollinators. Many believe their loss will not collapse or even stress any ecosystem.
I have no problems with the same treatment for fleas, ticks, chiggers, and bedbugs, either.... insects that cause nothing but misery and add little to nothing to the food chain.
useless one, like literally in Greek https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... (anopheles = an-ophelos = without use) so yes, we should.
What I thought they need to do is to genetically engineer another creature that has a food source other than animal blood that can serve as a food supply for the bigger animals.
start with lawyers and leave the poor mosquitoes alone.
I don't think we should be playing God and deciding who and what species deserve to be around. This seems like the beginning of a bad precedent. It is also extreme laziness. We know what causes and breeds mosquitoes. You should be working on a plan to eliminate the conditions that causes mosquitoes to breed in human population centers. More than that, mosquitoes are just convenient way for zika virus to get passed around. That doesn't mean there isn't any number of paths for pathogens to find their way to human hosts. Are we going to eliminate every species that can be a carrier?
Perhaps we should try to understand how zika was created. As always, our modern world will beget new species of viruses as a reaction to the things humans are doing. We are finding ways to fight viruses and they are mutating and finding ways to get back at us. It is quite probable that nature itself is trying to curb our own population growth in some manner. Right now, it isn't mosquitoes that is causing eco-logical disasters everywhere. We are
Bats also eat thousands and thousands of tons of insects that otherwise would wipe out our crops.
So then bats without any mosquitos to catch would simply catch more of the crop-destroying insects, right?
Bats are still around.
More crop pests are eaten.
Mosquitos are gone.
Sounds like a win/win/win.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
It's not a question of if, but when. All it takes is one (or more) intrepid scientist(s) with jars of genetically modified mosquitoes, or one mistake by a lab tech somewhere. I think it might be something like the way killer bees were released into the wild and then spread.
"Mit der Dummheit kaempfen Goetter selbst vergebens." - Schiller
See above...
I mean the article even uses rainforest
with extreme prejudice. Let me know when I can come outside again.
...of the food chain. That would solve all our problems.
Killing off mosquito larvae would probably mean the end of most species of freshwater fish, the end of dragonflies and damselflies, and probably a lot more species that I don't know about as far as their eating habits go.
What TF has this got to do with capitalism? If it happens, it will be a huge regulatory intervention, done by governments and inter-governmental organizations. It will not be done for profit. That's like the exact opposite of capitalism.
Oy vey, goy! If it's Sunday, it's Fash the Nation!
What could possibly go wrong!
See also: Four Pests Campaign
that spraying is working out. Oh well, fuck the bees and their pollinating non-sense.
Eliminating pests sure worked well for the Chinese, didn't it? http://io9.gizmodo.com/5927112...
Here is a picture of somebody in China hand-pollinating a pear tree due to one of the unintended side effects (no bees): https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-9wT...
People will always disagree by pointing out that other animals eat them but those animals will either adapt or die out. It's not the first time we've wiped out entire species and the planet hasn't exploded yet.
No matter what species we destroy the ecosystem will simply adapt and continue. We may lose a species of bird or fish here or there but something will adapt to take its place or they will simply adapt by eating something else. Life is infinitely adaptable and can cope with anything we throw at it short of cracking the entire planet in two.
Mosquitoes have killed more humans than every single war has ever fought and they continue to kill over one MILLION humans every single year. They should be wiped off the face of the planet as soon as possible.
Whatever happened to those laser mosquito zappers? They were coming real soon at least as far back as 2009. The inventors claimed it was easy to do with off the shelf components and aimed at $100 mass produced devices. There were all those cool slow motion videos of mosquitos shot down in flight. Nothing ever came of it... I'd happily pay $200 or more for a working system. There's a real need for such products, maybe a DIY version could be invented and people could build their own open source control systems for them. Malaria was bad enough, now with Zika all over the news I can't understand why these guys aren't swimming in cash.
Cwm, fjord-bank glyphs vext quiz
just this week news broke that several millions bees dies because of pesticides aimed at zika-bearing mosquitos. Imagine that on a global level, with unknown consequences to other species of animals
"life is a joke, and someone is laughing at me"
I have seen dramatic evidence that genetically modified fruit flies can wipe out populations and save millions worth of crops. This works on organic farms as well because no poison spray is required. These GM flies don't kill other species, only their own.
So, where are the modified mosquitoes?
...omphaloskepsis often...
Colonel William C. Gorgas tried for the Panama Canal which did allow for it to be built, but they came back. Some Mosquitoes will be immune to the toxin and we will have to find another one
Mosquitos are a prime food source for many different species, and their own food source (blood) is infinitely renewable so eliminating them seems short sighted as the void would be filled with other insect species competing for resources, possibly affecting bird/bat/amphibian populations that rely on this food source
Just as a point of reference, look up eradication of the screwworm fly. E.g., http://www.fao.org/docrep/U422...
What the fuck is wrong with people who concoct such cockamamey ideas?
They can't be too ecologically important. Besides, we have plenty of lawyers and politicians to fill the bloodsucker vacancy.
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
With the Singularity being postponed to 2045, this looks like the best chance for some worldwide disaster^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hexcitement before I die.
That is not begging the question.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
If "dozens [of species are] going extinct every day" already, then what's a couple hundred more?
Misusing "begs the question" makes you look stupid.
This is begging the question:
"Do you still beat your wife?"
Get it? Got it? Good.
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
Mosquitoes are only a problem when its hot and humid.
You don't see them around in the winter.
and they would be less of a problem then anyway. If all your skin is covered up to protect you from the 40 below wind chill then they wouldn't be able to bite you anyway.
Perhaps we should catch and cultivate in captivity a genetically viable population of the species we intend to eradicate, before we wipe them out. Then if we eliminate them from the wild and that proves to be a bad move, we at least have the option of reversing course.
While it would seem to be nice to not have these insects making parts of the earth effectively uninhabitable, lets be a little cautious before removing something that has been part of the Earths ecology for the past billion years or so.
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
Mosquitoes are killing us. It would be stupid not to fight back. That's how natural selection works.
I love how people talk about natural selection as if we weren't part of it. If mosquitoes are a pest to the apex predator of the planet and it decides to eliminate them, it has lost at natural selection because it was unfit to survive in an environment where we live. Other insects that don't spread disease to the apex predator are more fit. Just because we reason and can launch space ships into orbit doesn't mean that we are somehow outside of the forces that natural selection acts with. We are one of its tools for determining survival regardless of what we think.
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
I read on the internet that most cases of rabies in the US are contracted from Bill O'Reilly bites.
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
Contain them, don't eratic them all.
Stick them on an uninhabited island or something.
There's an article making the rounds that suggests that these cases of microcephaly are due to the use of illegal pesticides and poor living conditions in Brazil. This is the first article I've turned up on the subject and the idea seems to have some merit.
http://www.collective-evolution.com/2016/08/18/brazil-health-officials-suspect-zika-virus-is-not-responsible-for-the-rise-in-birth-defects/
We shouldn't vaccinate people either nor search for cures for cancer, since that will save us from overpopulation. (sic)
On the list of things that should be eradicated, mosquitoes come just after lawyers and just ahead of Republicans.
and kill all the merkins instead , the mozzies are more useful.
Sorry, I value a rainforest over a few humans.
Ever seen the movie Mimic?
We are interfering with Nature in all ways every day. Species are disappearing because some assholes want to cut some square miles of woods for small gain. I say, if we can, sure we should go full genocidal on the mosquitoes. Sure it will have unintended consequences, but if it has only a few of the intended ones, I'm IN.
Rome taught me patience and assiduous application to detail. Virtues which temper the boldness of great, general views.
Really? Can we talk about this without the obvious political bias? It's not like the countries in tropical zones are crazy capitalists.. They tend to swing left.
Why? And in a related note, apparently only two mosquito species transmit Zika. Why?
I'm asking because that Nature link only seems to be considering consequences of the loss of the species as a food source. What about some of the other possible consequences? Could these human-biting mosquitoes be filling an ecological niche, and without them could biting flies (which hurt like hell) end up filling the now-empty niche and exploding in population? Could Zika mutate into a different form which allows it to be transmitted by other mosquitoes, or even flies?
You can't just consider whether the rest of the ecosystem could survive the loss of mosquitoes. You have to look at how it would react to the loss.
Eradicating an abundant species that is in the middle of a food chain tends to impact the food chain above it. Anything that feeds on mosquitoes or their larvae, as well as any animal that feeds on the animals that eat mosquitoes may be impacted. It will also depend on the specific ecosystem where the mosquitoes are being eliminated. Tropical forests with their diversity of insects will be less affected (although highly specialized species like Gambia fish will go the way of the Dodo bird without mosquitoes). Tundra ecosystems where mosquitoes are large chunk of the insect biomass will be hit harder. You can also have effects that are hard to anticipate. For example, caribou migration routes are effected by mosquitoes (caribous like us tend to avoid being attacked by large swarms of insects). This in turn affects where lichens are being eaten and where caribous fertilize the soil with their dung. It may sound as cliche, but what doesn't kill you makes you stronger and we have very compelling evidence that pathogens, including the ones spread by mosquitoes, affect the evolution of their hosts. On the other hand, what are the chances that wiping out couple of the hundreds of mosquito species will have a major long lasting impact? All the consequences and their impact are hard to predict, but easy to verify once they happen (at least the short term ones). The best approach would be to eliminate locally mosquitoes in various environments and measure the effect on the ecosystem. If nothing bad happens than let's scale up and eliminate more of them (yeah I know, humanity's ability to agree on long term systematic approach and execute it to completion is not one of its strengths). For a while we will not have to scratch ourselves, then some other bug will fill the niche (blood is too tasty and filling meal, to be left wandering around).
The primary argument for killing them seems to be that it would help protect humans. The primary argument against seems to be that there might be environmental consequences.
Consider if the situation were reversed. Imagine that mosquitoes were currently not killing any humans, but were in danger of going extinct, and there might be environmental consequences to that.
But wait! Fortunately, we have the ability to save the mosquitoes. All it would take is for some 500,000 people to be sacrificed each year! Now I know this may seem a bit unethical, but most of these people are in very poor countries, so the don't really count, right?
When you put it like that, the two sides don't seem so evenly balanced. It becomes pretty clear that our moral obligation is to exterminate the mosquitoes that spread disease to humans as soon as we can, using all the tools at our disposal.
Some people also bring up the possibility that wiping out mosquitoes will give an opportunity for something worse to appear. I don't think this is a good counter argument.
First, it is never used for any other species that poses a similar health risk. No one would ring their hands over the possibility that wiping out HIV would cause something worse to replace it.
Second, there really isn't a mechanism by which wiping out mosquitoes could present an opportunity for another species. Mosquitoes don't compete with other blood-drinking insects the way foxes and coyotes compete with each-other over rabbits.
Foxes and coyotes both have a certain rate at which they consume rabbits. The rate at which foxes consume rabbits plus the rate at which coyotes consume rabbits must be less than the replenishment rate of the rabbits, or over hunting occurs. As a result, a reduction in the number of coyotes means there can be more foxes.
But mosquitoes and other bloodsuckers don't compete like this. The total amount of harvest-able blood is not much reduced by mosquito activities. 500,000 people/year out of around 7,000,000,000 people = around 0.007% of the world population per year. True, this rate is much higher in high-mosquito regions, but even with very generous assumptions, it's unlikely to rise above 5%.
The upshot of all this is that wiping out mosquitoes won't suddenly cause a huge increase the amount of food available for any other species whose food source is similar to the mosquito's. As a result, any species that would be enabled by killing the mosquitoes should already have appeared, because the environment is just as favorable for them now as it would be if we were to kill the mosquitoes.
Male mosquitoes pollinate orchids. It's only the female mosquitoes that need a blood meal to lay eggs.
... and it overcame this by drying out swamps and improving healthcare. It can be done, if you fix your other social/economic problems, first.
So biting flies or some other species would bite people more because the mosquitos that bite people were killed off? How does that make sense from an evolutionary standpoint? The presence or non presence of mosquitos that bite people should not make a difference as to whether some other species evolves to attack humans or not. Just because a mosquito bites a person doesnt mean another species cant.
I ignore Anonymous Coward posts. If you want to discuss something, that's awesome. Log in.
Or at least make them pay the damage they do? Only capitalists seem to be able to come up with such stupid ideas. Then it takes years to prove that it DOES harm, because any proof in a multifactorial context is very difficult to obtain. See e.g. the neonicotinoids, which have decimated the pollenizers and enriched criminal chemical labs for more that 2 decades until their lethal effects could not be contested any more.
Sincerely Yours,
Birds, Bats, and Spiders.
Why is there an "insightful" mod and why isn't it "-1"? If I wanted insight, I wouldn't be reading
Seriously, Mosquitoes transfer virus between eurkayotes which transfers gene splices amongst us. THIS is our real basis for genetic variation. Lose that, and we bring evolution to a near stop. If we stop evolving, then it is over for our species, and possible all eurkayotes.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Really? Can we talk about this without the obvious political bias? It's not like the countries in tropical zones are crazy capitalists.. They tend to swing left.
Sure, because the USSR and east Germany were all tropical nations.
Why we dont kill all human ,Will be better for the planet
I mean, kill the people bringing it into the USA. That means 'tourists' and other wastes of food. If you're young, white, liberal, and need your third-world cultural experience, go to a place without the zika epidemic.
Actually, that's just harsh, and unwarranted. It would be sufficient to quarantine all tourists from zika-infested areas until they are proven non-infected or no longer contagious. No need to be so harsh as to exterminate them.
We don't really understand the effect of mosquitoes on the overall biosphere. Is there something critical to us that relies, perhaps indirectly, on the little buggers? Quite possibly, but there is no one who knows enough to tell us. Better not to go with the nuclear option when we are in such a state of ignorance.
linquendum tondere
http://www.naturalnews.com/052...
http://articles.mercola.com/si...!
"For decades, Zika transmission was extremely rare. The virus didn't start spreading until after 2012 -- right after the biotech company Oxitec released genetically modified mosquitoes en masse in Brazil. Zika outbreaks quickly exploded from sites where genetically modified mosquitoes were released to combat dengue. Zika has now spread to 21 other countries and territories.
What's appalling is that Zika virus (ATCC VR-84) can be purchased from ATCC labs. It was deposited by Dr. Jordi Casals-Ariet of the Rockefeller Foundation and sourced from the blood of an experimental forest sentinel rhesus monkey from Uganda in 1947.
The question remains: Is Zika virus a bio-weapon, intentionally released via genetically modified mosquito? Perhaps it wasn't intentionally released but instead was an unintended consequence of releasing GM mosquitoes into the environment to eradicate dengue. Maybe this Zika strain is a resistant, mutant viral strain -- the evolution of a mosquito-borne virus caused by a biotech experiment gone bad?"
Those articles suggest that spraying pesticides and pushing vaccines on pregnant women may also have contributed to brain development issues in babies.
From the second article: "Children exposed to the aerial pesticide spraying were about 25 percent more likely to be diagnosed with autism or have a documented developmental delay than those living in areas that used other methods of pesticide application (such as manual spreading of granules). If authorities use the supposed threat of Zika to increase aerial spraying, it could increase children's risk of brain disorders, which is the opposite of what anti-Zika campaigns are supposed to achieve. ... ..."
It's possible Zika-carrying mosquitoes could be involved in suspected cases of microcephaly, but there are other factors that should be considered as well. For starters, the outbreak occurred in a largely poverty-stricken agricultural area of Brazil that uses large amounts of banned pesticides. Between these factors and the lack of sanitation and widespread vitamin A and zinc deficiency, you already have the basic framework for an increase in poor health outcomes among newborn infants in that area. Environmental pollution and toxic pesticide exposure have been positively linked to a wide array of adverse health effects, including birth defects.
So, another reading of things is that previous expensive interventions (GM mosquitoes, vaccinations, pesticides) caused the problem that is now being used to justify more of the same expensive interventions with more profits to the same pushers... Meanwhile, the root cause of poverty, ignorance, poor nutrition are not being addressed.
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
If you kill them all, then something like ISIS might spawn in their place.
We should not after all, it is the state bird of Florida.
WARNING: Smartphones have side effects--most of them undocumented.
Having actually been to and lived in those high mosquito regions, I seriously doubt mosquitos are the reason we can't live in the Amazon. Yeah the bite rate is annoying. My guess is one pinprick per minute or even 30 seconds maybe at certain places/times.
I do recall holding my hand out once and within a minute a bunch of mosquitos landed. Interestingly none or few of them actually bit!
You can avoid mosquito bites by using a mosquito repellent in the home and also making sure it's sealed/meshed .. or sleeping under a mosquito net with is surprising effective.
Actually my biggest fear there was giant centipedes and snakes .. especially anacondas .. no thanks. The reason you can't live in the Amazon is because of centipedes and snakes.
Despite my venturing in South and Central America, my worst experience with mosquitos was camping in North Florida.
Anyway I don't like insects or reptiles, so when we leave Earth I hope we aren't taking them with us to Mars or wherever (Proxima B?).
You don't know what you are talking about. Seriously.
First of all, it's DEET, not "deet". It's an acronym that stands for "N,N-Diethyl-meta-Toluamide" and thus it should be capitalized. While we're at it, the plural of mosquito is "mosquitoes", not "mosquitos". Who are you, Dan Quail? I wouldn't normally mention this but when you make multiple posting errors...
Third of all it's true that DEET doesn't kill mosquitoes, but it isn't marketed as a pesticide, so what's your point? It certainly does repel mosquitoes and it is marketed as such. There may be some technical "no one cares" definition where it does not repel, but again, no one cares but you, apparently.
DEET is highly effective as a repellant. I've used the stuff for years and nothing else is nearly as good as DEET to my knowledge. That includes spending many months in the Far North where, if you don't have good repellants, you could lose your mind due to the continual harassment from mosquitoes and blackflies and No-SeeUms. You learn in a hurry what works and what does not.
Caribou voluntarily move back and forth from snow and ice patches to grassy tundra, due mostly to the flies and mosquitoes. The biting flies don't like the cold and relent on snowy ground. However the caribou need to graze and that means going back to the tundra. Also the caribou migrate long distances and so they eventually are forced to cross long stretches of grassy tundra, no matter what.
I suggest you go back to your armchair and get a real education. Or, go visit the Far North, it could change your life, and usually for the better.
So, we have goten to the point where we will just kill off any species that pose a threat to us? Have we reached a point where technology is driving us towards rekless manipulation simply because we can.
A quick fix never lasts, and often has unforseen consequences.
We have become lazy and demanding without foresight.
What could possibly go wrong.
Regards O-
Yes
Sure, "The only dire consequence of eliminating these is [benefits]". Sure, "Mosquito-eating species can easily switch to other, similar, bugs..." It has all been said before, many, many times.
"Let's introduce Asian Carp into North American rivers, Carp reproduce rapidly, are good to eat, and enhance fishing!" Result: A plague of carp. Boating is actually unsafe on certain rivers (the carp jump at the sound of boat engines).
"Let's introduce Cane Toads into Australia, Cane Toads eat Cane Beatles and little else!" Result: A plague of Cane Toads, and literally no impact on Cane Beatles whatsoever.
"Let's bring cats to these beautiful tropical islands! Cats are beautiful too and will blend right in!" Result: 99.9% of indigenous tropical birds disappear, being unable to evolve defensive strategies fast enough. (Full Disclosure: Norway rats are part of this problem too).
"Let's dump some Lionfish into Florida waters, they are beautiful and exotic, and we don't then have to kill them." Result: Local reef fish are becoming scarce due to heavy predation by Lionfish.
"Let's release our huge Burmese pythons into the Florida Everglades. They are too big and dangerous to take care of. Besides, crocodiles are the top carnivores and will eat anything." Result: Crocodiles are being out-predated by Burmese pythons.
The point is, we keep thinking or saying that we know everything we need to know. Sometimes we do but our track record frankly sucks. Introducing new species into a range they don't naturally occupy is full of unknowns. And we rarely have enough patience or control to reverse the experiment, should it go wrong.
...eradicate all human biting mosquitoes, responsible for around 500,000 deaths per year then move on to at least reducing the number of vehicles on the road, which kill around 1,250,000 people each year ( http://www.who.int/gho/road_safety/mortality/en/ ). That's 2 1/2 times more than mosquitoes. We'd also more than likely reduce CO2 emissions in the process; it's a win-win situation :)
Elephants don't fly, Stupid!!
Lol.
Just channeling my inner Trump. Sorry. :)
Truth isn't Truth - Guliani
There are plenty of mosquitos. You can't kill them all.
Get rid of them in North America and let them breed in other countries.
My city drops larvicide down all the storm sewers three times a year in order to prevent West Nile Virus. (We've had no cases here and no positive tests in mosquitoes either this year.) So the bugs are gone and the job is done. But the flies are the worst they have been in at least 12 yeast (I can't say any further because I've only lived in this house for 12 years). The problem is that there are no predators in my suburb to eat flying insects anymore. Before the city started dropping the larvicide down the storm sewers there were plenty of swifts, purple martins, bats, and other flying animals that would eat insects. There was only parcel of land where some swifts managed to live until a last year when houses started being built on it. Now none of those animals exist in the suburb. The city could have encouraged more of those birds and bats to thrive here by giving away homes for them. It would have been cheaper in the long run instead of having to apply chemicals three times a year, every year.
Now we are seeing parts of the city where insect populations are getting out of control because there are no predators around. The city has to respond with chemicals because that's the only response left to them. The ecosystem is much more complex than what you think, even if you think it's complex. This plan isn't just taking out a particular insect. It has a purpose in the web or else it would exist.
Liberals love insects too much. Would not be politically correct. Of coarse we could kill all the Spics, who are giving the virus to the mosquitoes. But that would also not be politically correct. However we could kill all the white people, because the white people did spread diseases to native americans. Yes. Let's do that. Let's kill all the white people. Spics are not white, nor did they kill any native Americans. The whole Coronado Conquistador thing was just a plot by white people to spread disinformation. Let's kill white people. The Zika virus and mosquitoes are living organisms that have right to survive. But if we kill enough white people, there will be less vectors for the disease to spread to the disenfranchised Latino population living in the Native homeland of Florida.
Win-Win.
We should exterminate anything and everything we deem a pest, annoyance, non-Human predator, etc. We should also make damn certain the DNA is never lost - mosquitoes are a very well designed flying hypodermic needle. Imagine we want to inoculate a massive wild population of something in the future or if we find aliens we go to war with and need such a tool - or even just basic genomic research to figure out what the genes did and expand our toolbox. Any species slated for extinction should be kept in a cold storage location similar to the doomsday seed vault after having the whole genomes of as many members of the species as required to be able to reconstruct the species as a whole at a later time if required. The extinction part itself is perfectly fine - just don't lose the precious data that took millions of years to be created.
The connection to pollinators alone is serious but we don't know how Gaia works, really. We don't know anything. Hubris will be our downfall. "So are there any downsides to removing mosquitoes? According to Phil Lounibos, an entomologist at Florida University, mosquito eradication "is fraught with undesirable side effects". He says mosquitoes, which mostly feed on plant nectar, are important pollinators. They are also a food source for birds and bats while their young - as larvae - are consumed by fish and frogs. This could have an effect further up and down the food chain." source: http://www.bbc.com/news/magazi...
I just had this idea today. Their mouths are too small for biting people, and they are non-aggressive. Maybe they could be bread with some genetic disorder to disallow reproduction once hatched to not disrupt the bird or predator population?
The biosphere is big. Really, really big. Sitting in your indoor room on your computer, chances are you have no awareness at all how mind-bogglingly big and complicated it is. Every footprint you leave in the dirt can become a breeding ground for mosquitoes after the next rain. Every crook where a branch meets a tree trunk. Every rain gutter, storm drain, abandoned swimming pool, and man made thing that can catch water during or after a rain. Every piece of vegetation that emerges from a swamp or body of water. Every body of water that isn't rapidly moving. This is ALL breeding ground to one kind of mosquito or another.
And a single female on one blood meal can pump out two to three hundred eggs in some species. And a couple weeks later she can do it again. For an entire year. And if the weather is warm enough those eggs will hatch, the larvae will go through five instars and pupate, emerging as a result in as little as two weeks -- although normally it takes twice as long. But in a hot wet summer, you can start with one gravid female and, well, do the math. Not all those eggs reach maturity, otherwise you'd be talking thousands of billions of descendants, but it is extremely easy to start with a handful of mosquitoes and within a couple of years have them spread across an entire contintent -- as happened when Aedes albopictus was introduces to the United States in 1985 in a shipment of tires. Fifteen years later it in a swath all the way from California to Maine, which is remarkable because it's a tropical species not particularly suited to the climates it was moving in. If you were talking about a species like Culex pipiens which is endemic to temperate climates it'd spread faster. Much, much faster.
So here's what happens in the very best imaginable case: you manage to wipe out most of the individuals of the targeted species in the world. But pockets remain, because the biosphere is huge and you just can't get to all the places they are. Your genetically modified mosquitoes (assuming that's what you're using) die out. The wild mosquitoes in the remaining pockets are now surrounded by vast swaths of unexploited habitat, which won't take long to expand into.
Mosquitoes are simply not eradicable. I don't care if you had something which worked ten times as well as DDT, cost one tenth as much, and was environmentally benign as distilled water. They cannot be eradicated. They can only be controlled until they're a tolerable nuisance. And if you want to keep them tolerable you must continue to control them. Forever.
It doesn't mean you can't do a really good job at controlling them, or that you can't eradicate them from certain relatively small but significant-to-us areas of the Earth. But they will come back.
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no corellation with birth defect, just fear mongering as usual.
But two things I wonder about are Mosquitos and ticks. Exactly what the flaming taint of Satan's purpose do they have in ecology? As far as I can see - none. A remote possibility of some strange DNA exchange, but that's just conjecture, based on a few stories I've heard from some scientists.
I would love to see an experiment to eliminate either or both form an area to see if there are any negative effects before a total eradication efort happens. Maybe we could add fleas to that list.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Seemingly unhinged about the whole Climate Debate and unrestrained with their attempts to form a NWO, these nut cases besides proposing changing the Earths CO2 cycles, now are releasing proteins into the Biosphere they have no clue what their affect will be.
NOW they also want to pick and shoose what species are going to survive seemingly content to watch whole Biospheres collapse as long as it means more tax money for their research.
This is going to end badly.
Got Geometrodynamics? Awe, too hard to figure out? Too bad.
If mosquito = target species AND mosquito has Malaria
Then kill mosquito
Minimise unintended consequences.
Stupid suggestion
Actually, Zika is pretty serious. For one thing, scientists now believe that even in those pregnant women who were infected who had *apprently* normal babies, those babies may have neurological defects that may not show up immediately. Some of these babies have abnormal brains inside normal-size skulls, and in others the effects may be more subtle but still present.
Maybe "abnormal brains" is how evolution works.
... To create vaccines for the diseases Mosquitoes carry? To say nothing of the more "humane" thing?
Why should they have tasty mosquitoes to eat? They can eat ants instead!
Mosquitoes provide a means of propagating cross-species pathogen vectors ensuring evolution in those species (of course it can also mean eradication, but generally there is a percentage of the population that survives). Eliminating mosquitoes may provide an immediate solution to the Zika problem, but in my opinion is short sighted and will make future iterations of various species including humans less able to adapt to new variations of viruses and bacteria.
No. That's not a given. Humanity has been in an all-out war of annihilation with insects for thousands, perhaps millions, of years - and we've never once managed to drive a single insect species to extinction.
Insects are a lot more resilient than most other kingdoms and while some have gone extinct in history - never yet by human hands, unlike almost every other kingdom on the planet. We've eradicated at least one virus. We've eradicated more animal species than we can count. Many species of fish. Quite a few moluscs and lots of reptiles (especially several species of giant tortous)... but no insect yet.
It's by no means assured that we could - especially one such as the mosquito family which is incredibly widespread across many continents with huge regions of relatively inaccessible habitat. We've, in the past, managed local eradications of specific mosquito species (Singapore for example used to be a Malaria zone) - but Anopheles lives on. At best we've reduced it's range a bit.
And that's just one species - mosquitos are a family of many. Zika is also not like Malaria. Malaria is a parasite that's only carried by one species of Mosquito - Zika a is a virus and potentially able to be carried by almost any of them (especially since virusses can adapt much faster than parasites).
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
Start with the mozzies then progress to the muzzies
I think, on principle, we have eradicated enough species already without thinking, or thinking no further than our own, short term comfort. Like when we eradicate a top predator, because it occasionally takes a few of our cattle, and then we get overrun by billions of whatever used to be its main prey species - and they generally turn out to be a much, much bigger problem. We don't need to rush headlong into doing these things - we are clever animals, we can find better solutions than killing without thinking. We don't actually have much knowledge about whether these mosquitoes have an important role to play in their environment; a lot of mosquitoes are important pollinators, and just remember the ongoing furore about the honey bees.
No more Mexican Muslims?
I think before we make any sort of risky move eliminating mosquitoes I think we should be asking about what role they play with the human immune system.
Half a million deaths in the Human population is not a lot and I would be interested in the specifics of those people who did die before executing a species. A lot of people *don't* die from being bitten by a mosquito, after all. People's immune systems should be strong enough to tolerate the challenge of being bitten by a mosquito.
How do we know we are not compromising our species immune responses over time if we don't have something like a mosquito to challenge it?
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
1. You can't kill all the mosquitoes - Bayesian effectiveness assures some will survive and they will likely be mutants
2. You will end up killing a valuable species - the recent destruction of honey bees is precisely a case of this and a predictable outcome
3. Some animals do dine on mosquitoes - what will be the result of eliminating them? Wiping out entire ecosystems and other species? Anyone who claims to know it won't happen is lying.
Says the western elitist who uses 30 times the amount of resources of the poor third worlder he wants to target for eugenics.
Use what literally?
Mosquitoes and people are in equilibrium. If you kill all the mosquitoes that are killing people, you will have a lot more people. You will then have to accommodate all those extra people. They will be fighting for resources with people who were previously in equilibrium. That will cause wars. So, if you want to kill all the mosquitoes that kill people, you need to simultaneously introduce birth control to the people.
Every time we try to eradicate something, really bad shit happens. Unintended consequences anyone?
Besides, humans are waaaaay more invasive...
yes kill them all
We ought to be wary of how we chose to alter the world around us, and certainly more so than those before us given our greater abilities, but that doesn't mean we should refrain from making said alterations. The mosquito is not critical to any ecosystem whatsoever.
It does however heavily assist in the spread of Malaria, Zika, etc. which in turn spread fear and instability.
Its bite can cause painful allergic reactions in adults and children.
It ruins real opportunities to simply be outside, and while that doesn't seem like much, it is. In the U.S. in particular, where people really quite honestly should get out more, the inability to enjoy an evening walk is having a real cost for our economy and quality of life given the adverse effects on our health.
They're not a mere nuisance to be put up with for the sake of keeping nature in balance. They're a threat that are responsible for hundreds of thousands of human deaths every year.
If we can wipe them out, we ought to do it.
Let us wipe out the right species for once. (Seriously.)
During the great plague that decimated Europe, someone had the brilliant idea that it was those evil-eyed cats causing the plague. There were cat bonfires until the cats themselves dwindled in number. Unfortunately it was the fleas indigenous to rats that were spreading the plague. Needless to say there was a rat population explosion. It did not work out well.
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Kill them ALL!!!! With FIRE!!!! I hate the little bastards!
...we are obviously not smart enough to realize all the potential consequences of such a drastic action. It'd likely be more 'Future Shock' ramifications. We are just 'monkeys with a machine gun'!
Perhaps we should kill all the jihadists first.
Self-importance and self-indulgence is the root of ALL evil.
If we're going to eliminate all blood-sucking parasites of the world, let's start with the ones hurting us the most... I'm talking, of course, about politicians.