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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?
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
As much as i like bats as any other person, they are the most popular remaining source of rabies in the developed world.
Bats also eat thousands and thousands of tons of insects that otherwise would wipe out our crops. They are extremely useful creatures. I think we can put up with the relatively insignificant annoyance of a few of them having rabies, especially in view of the fact that we have had a rabies vaccine since 1885.
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
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...
It has been investigated. Turns out they are not important for any other species, everything that eats mosquitos mainly eat other things.
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.
Does that mean if people keep using the phrase "I could care less", then the words could and couldn't officially switch meaning?
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
You can't imagine consequences because you lack any kind of knowledge about nature.
While they are undesirable for humans, mosquitoes are the source of food of a very large number of animals. Bats, lizards, frogs, fish, birds, etc many of them survive on eating mosquitoes. Kill the mosquito and you will be killing a good number of species of animals that depend on them.
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!
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.