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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."
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.
#mosquitolivesmatter
>"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.
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
In many parts of the country or world spraying is used to control mosquitos. Spraying not only kills the fast majority of mosquitos in an area but likely kills other bugs in the area as well. If wiping out the mosquitos eliminated an important food source for other species, we would be seeing a significant decline of other species in areas of heavy spraying. While I'm not arguing for eliminating mosquitos without seriously looking at it, spraying will continue as will the environmental consequences of spraying until it happens.
Additionally, our politicians always are saying "if the life of one child can be saved...." give up your freedoms. People seem to be pretty ready to live under onerous government rule to save that one (or twelve) lives per year saved. Well, here we have a situation where we can measure what the worth of a human life truly is worth.
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.
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.
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
Gee, if only the biologists were as clever as Slashdot posters.
No sig today...
Deciding people should die for the sake of preserving mosquitoes is also playing God. Once the possibility exists, you can't avoid deciding.
The closest this planet has to a nervous system is our society. Nature isn't trying to limit us any more than your body is trying to limit you. Some choices might have less than optimal outcomes, but that's no different from you getting a hangover: it's not that your body is trying to stop you from drinking, it's that it's not working well do to your actions.
If you wish to mystify this, then karma is a better framework than vengeful nature deity.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
Unfortunately, mosquitoes have no souls.
That doesn't mean that hell isn't full of them.
No sig today...
I think both you and the GP need a healthy dose of [citation needed].
People have driven so many species extinct that we're a major global extinction event. Suddenly when we decide to do it intentionally just once to the most disastrous killers who server no purpose in their ecosystem and are easily replaced by non-harmful species, that's when it becomes wrong?
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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!
The effect would be no worse than if pizza stopped existing.
Please think about what you are saying!
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 Gene drive under discussion is Aedes aegypti specific, Aedes aegypti isn't the only mosquito species present even in it's home range and due to it's habit of laying eggs in tiny pools of water is never an important prey species. What basis do you have for saying that the elimination of a specific pathogen spreading species in the Americas where it is an invasive species is a problem?
Democracy is a sheep and two wolves deciding what to have for lunch. Freedom is a well armed sheep contesting the issue
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.
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There is a difference between murder and manslaughter.
I'm not trying to make some emotional argument with that, just pointing out why people may perceive the extinction of species differently in this case.
We intentionally eradicated smallpox.
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