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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.
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.
Let's kill the rich and all the corporations instead. The planet will thank us.
>"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.
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
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.
I guess because it would be an intentional extinction in the era of modern conservationism.
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...
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
Unfortunately, mosquitoes have no souls.
That doesn't mean that hell isn't full of them.
No sig today...
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...
This is hypothetical. Even if somebody indiscriminately releases millions of genetically modified death-skeeters, it would not make mosquitoes extinct. There are more than 3,500 species of mosquito, for one. Also, from the BBC article, "Would it be wrong to eradicate mosquitoes?
"Mit der Dummheit kaempfen Goetter selbst vergebens." - Schiller
Just as a point of reference, look up eradication of the screwworm fly. E.g., http://www.fao.org/docrep/U422...
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
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.