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I am pretty sure they were talking about people. From the Nature article

"The ecological effect of eliminating harmful mosquitoes is that you have more people. That's the consequence," says Strickman.

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There's a certain strain of environmentalist that sees deindustrialization, technological regression, and human population decline as the solution to the world's problem. This perspective misses the mark, I think.

Human population decline would solve a lot of our environmental problems and is not necessarily tied to technological regression. In many developed countries it happens by itself and it could rather easily be helped along with some financial incentives, say, a tax on children.

The last thing we need is a tax on children in societies with sub-replacement fertility. A world without growth is a terrible place. (Before you object: yes, economic growth isn't the same as population growth. But to get economic growth with a declining population, you need productivity to grow faster than the population declines, and we're already having trouble keeping productivity growth up.)

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/02/business/economy/imagining...

why does productivity need to go up if the population is declining? what about the unemployed?

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