Let's Kill All the Mosquitoes | Hacker News Reader

Let's Kill All the Mosquitoes

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491 pointswwilson425 comments

We've done this lots[1] of[2] times[3] when it threatens agriculture, but when it threatens the lives of poor people in third world countries, suddenly we're worried about the ecosystem?

There will be an environmental impact, but it will be from hundreds of millions of humans not getting malaria and climbing their way out of property, not from the lack of mosquitoes in the ecosystem. It's still a significant problem, but our current solution of "let all the poor people die" is not a good one.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cochliomyia_hominivorax

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ceratitis_capitata

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anastrepha_ludens

It's not really an apples to apples comparison. All of those are invasive species, except for the screw fly, which isn't a large part of a biological ecosystem (e.g. a sizeable portion of the Myotis lucifugus diet).

In principle why should it matter whether a particular species is native or invasive? Regardless of whether a particular species spread to an area naturally or were introduced by humans we have to deal with them as they exist today. And certainly some mosquito species are invasive to the areas where they live now.

The difference is that invasive species are considered harmful to the ecosystem while naturally spread species are considered part of the ecosystem.

Native species are just an invasive species 10 000 years later.

Ok, so in the year 11950 we can have a debate about whether or not a species has been around long enough to be considered native. Right now, they're still invasive.

Who gets to decide what is "harmful" and what isn't? Why is it necessarily better to have one animal species in a certain area rather than another? Valuing native species over invasive species seems like an arbitrary human value judgment. (I don't necessarily disagree with eradicating invasive species, but I've noticed that people often haven't thought it through or considered their biases.)

>Who gets to decide what is "harmful" and what isn't?

Typically zoologists, botanists, and other biologists who study local ecosystems and determine the damage done by invasive species.

Construing this as a human concept doesn't make it arbitrary - anthropogenic impact on the environment is important because we rely on our environment for survival as a species. Damage isn't limited to just a less biological diversity, it can and has stretched into agriculture and human production.

Why, you get to decide. And I do. And everyone else. Just like we all chose whom to listen to. Turns out that people who study these things and understand the implications tend to be more listened to than, say, me, because I'm not an expert.

But to explain a bit of the reasoning, as I understand it, invasive species are considered harmful to ecosystems because they tend to throw them out of equilibrium. If you introduce something to an environment with no natural predators or other environment feedback loops to constrain population growth, the newly introduced species has a field day, for a bit, until it kills off whatever it feeds on. Since ecosystems are inherently deeply interconnected things, the boom-bust cycle causes all sorts of problems.

Now maybe a new equilibrium is eventually "better" than it was before, but that, I think, is the real arbitrary human value judgment. Observing that introducing a new species throws existing systems out of whack isn't a value judgement - it accurately describes what happens.

But real world ecosystems are never in equilibrium, at least not for long. Even isolated ecosystems with little human contact and no invasive species experience boom and bust cycles. So we're actually just discussing the appropriate rate of change. How fast is too fast?

I don't think ecologists use the word the same way you do. I'm not an ecologist; I just used to date one. But I do know that equilibrium in the ecology sense is not static at all.

If I'm understanding your comment about the rate of change, I think you're talking about drift between equilibria.

Asking about "too fast" is where the human value judgement comes in. Which isn't invalid, it is just human-centric and far from the whole picture. Stating that introducing an invasive species can destroy the existing ecosystem is a statement of fact without judgement. It is just an observation of reality.

Reminds my if an old timey sayjng—"A weed is just a plant out of place."

And back on topic - Kill 'em all - native, invasive, makes no difference. As I read the expert concensus, after eradication the likelihood of some edge case eco-dependency being revealed should be vanishingly small, whereas the status quo allows millions of homo sapiens to be sickened and or killed.

That seems like easy math to me.

NB: I'm a Southerner (Peach state) so I'll admit I carry a strong, but well earned, hatred of the vile creatures.

It matters because unless you understand the ecosystem very well, you don't know what else the presence of a native species affects.

For example look at the phenomena of keystone species. If you remove starfish from a beach, the mussels will take over and the rest of the tidepool animals get wiped out. The reason is that the starfish prefer eating mussels and so maintain a balance. Unless you really know the ecosystem, it is hard to tell what is a keystone species that completely changes things.

An introduced species is easier. Unless it is in the same ecological niche as a native, there is no possibility that it is a necessary part of the balance.

Unfortunately, mosquitoes are likely to have a significant ecological role. They have preferred targets. Their role as a disease vector affects what population density those targets can have. Wipe out the mosquitoes, and you don't know what will happen to that ecosystem.

That said, I've been bitten by enough mosquitoes that I'm willing to risk it...

They have preferred targets.

The methods discussed in the article can be targeted on a per species basis. The action could be limited to mosquito species that prefer to target humans.

(the sterile male method is already being used)

Removing a native species carries a much greater risk of causing ecosystem collapse (massively reducing biodiversity) than removing an invasive species. Biodiversity is practically valuable (e.g. drug candidates) and some people feel it's inherently valuable. (Also some people feel that preserving the natural ecosystem is inherently valuable, though I don't have that feeling myself).

Aedes mosquitoes are indeed "invasive" in much (arguably, most) of the world.

Yes and eliminating two specific Aedes species from where they are invasive is by far the best plan of action.

Claiming that mass extinction of all mosquitoes from the ecosystem is a bullet the environment can take is another matter.

Agree completely with your first point.

To your second point: eliminating all blood-feeding mosquitoes is the most radical proposal I've ever encountered, and this is a small subset of all mosquitoes (itself a small subset of Culicidae). I've never seen it compellingly demonstrated that these mosquitoes have an irreplacable role in any ecosystem, but there's much we don't grasp that an incremental and cautious approach seems wise.

Humans are invasive in, arguably, all of the world.

Just about, yeah.

There are places where mosquitos are an invasive species. Hawaii apparently did not have mosquitos until they were introduced there by humans. So that might be a good place to experiment with eradicating them, the "it's not natural" argument would carry less weight there.

Precisely. To be clear, eradication of invasive mosquito species where they aren't native is a great idea. Thinking that removing mosquitoes from the ecosystems everywhere won't have a negative impact on the environment is less so.

There will be obviously an impact. Question is how big.

I don't really understand why we're arguing about this. How many species have we lost as a result of human activity? What's one more.

Here's a list[1].

Fuck the mosquito.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lists_of_extinct_animals 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thylacine

The point is we are deliberately trying to eliminate their existence and we will be directly responsible for that.

I can live with that

See my second reference to the Thylacine. We deliberately tried to eliminate that creature and succeeded.

Those eradications were paid for by the Department of Agriculture (and equivalent organizations in other regions). Who is going to pay for the mosquito?

I'm not objecting. I think we should eradicate the mosquito. But as someone who has worked for the government (albeit a different branch) I know that bureaucrats are not being evil or heartless when they don't allocate funds for necessary work that falls outside of their mandate: they could go to jail for misallocation of taxpayer funds. So whose mandate is this?

As an Alaskan AND a Floridian: If they wanna auction/raffle off the privilege of throwing the switch I would attempt to give them all my money.

I am pretty much ground zero of where they want to release them down here in the FL Keys and I am all for it. The amount of chemicals they pump out in the summer months is enough to sway me towards the belief that it can not be much if any riskier. When we hear the hum of the mosquito truck we have to yell, to our kids playing outside, to get in the house and stay out of the mist. Most of the other locals are vehemently opposed to their release. I say they cannot release them fast enough.

When my mom was little, "it was very exciting when we heard the DDT truck coming and all the kids would run out of their houses or off the beach and run behind the fogging truck...the smell was kind of sweet and running in the DDT fog was fun."

The solution? Make it smell like ass.

My mother and aunt both have fond memories of doing this - apparently the mist was really cool and refreshing. Also they're both breast cancer survivors.

"The Winged Scourge" is an interesting piece from that time:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y68F8YwLWdg

>The amount of chemicals they pump out in the summer months is enough to sway me towards the belief that it can not be much if any riskier.

That's the spirit.

Same here: release early and release often. I live in Bahama Village, would be happy to host the trial run.

The opposition to the Oxitec project spout the most depressing anti-science nonsense.

That is actually a really good idea. A national lottery to decide who presses the switch. Lots of people will enter.

...but then Alaska would have to find a new state bird.

>"bureaucrats are not being evil or heartless when they don't allocate funds for necessary work that falls outside of their mandate: they could go to jail for misallocation of taxpayer funds. "

Which bureaucrat has gone to jail for making any decision of this sort? The BLM sold ~1700 protected wild horses to a slaughterhouse a few years ago, and I don't think anyone was even reprimanded.[1] EPA allowed 11 million litres of contaminated, toxic wastewater to pollute the a river, and no disciplinary action was taken (that I know of), even though it seems this would be negligence (or a criminal offense) if a private party had done it.[2]

[1] http://investigations.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/05/14/17708998-...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2015_Gold_King_Mine_waste_wate...

Clearly the EPA screwed up, but the BLM should have promoted rather than jailed the bureaucrat who sold the feral horses. That program should be ramped up: it would be better for the horses and for the arid environment that they inhabit if the absolutely necessary regular culling resulted in nutrition rather than thousands of horses penned up to no purpose for the rest of their lives. It's not as though we're going to run out of them, for the several hundred people every year who decide to buy a mustang. Giant ungulates with no natural predators, there will always be more mustangs, at least until irresponsible humans allow them to destroy their habitat completely.

I have heard of equivalent 'screwups' described as horrific criminal actions, described as being done by greedy, stupid, and lazy people who should be sent to federal prison; but alas, those were private parties. My point was that catastrophic negligence goes unpunished when committed by a bureaucrat.

Horses were native to North America, and existed on the continent before humans arrived; they were probably wiped out by said humans. These 'giant ungulates' have much the same natural predators as bison and deer, which also happen to be 'giant ungulates', but whose presence I do not believe you would object to.

I suppose we just have different ideas about what constitutes "catastrophic negligence", although I agree that government employment shouldn't shield one from the consequences of negligence.

The "horses" you're talking about were a different species, they were much smaller, they disappeared 12,000 years ago, and their predators included Smilodon and dire wolves. Environmental conditions have changed since then. The feral horses I'm talking about descend from long-domesticated stock of Europe, Africa, and the Middle East. They are larger and more robust than typical deer. They inhabit desert country that currently doesn't have gray wolves and has only a tiny population of cougars. These two are really the only predators that could take down feral horses on a consistent basis, and they don't control feral horse populations in these areas. The vegetation in these areas is continually degraded by the presence of feral horses, which harms many actually wild species. Bison are not a factor because these areas are too hot and arid.

My objections to feral horses are not philosophical. If they occupied a sustainable niche in these environments I'd be happy. That just isn't the case. For more information about the mustang as it currently exists, I recommend the movie Unbranded, currently on Netflix. That movie sets up some sort of fake conflict between feral horses on BLM land vs private cattle on that land. It's true that horses' dentition means a single horse damages plants more than a single cow does. It's also true that neither domesticated animal should be present on much of this sensitive wild desert land in anything close to their current numbers.

Not familiar with bison, but we do have the same issue with deer, as I understand it. We've driven out their natural predators, so they have a habit of overpopulating and eating their environment clean, then starving off. That's why we encourage controlled hunting. Keeps the numbers down to what they would have been if we still had wolves/bears around eating them.

The deer population in Michigan appears to be quite a lot higher than it might be under predation, the DNR manages the herd to have a large population so that there can be a larger harvest.

I would. The hunting to scarcity of gray wolves led to a boom of deer who ravage crops and woods, carry disease, and create hazards for humans on roadways and when they end up in cities. And look up rates for CWD in your state, and hope it never becomes transmissible to humans.

Bison have the same issues with overpopulation and overgrazing, and they're being allowed to roam outside of Yellowstone again soon, which is making people nervous. They're destructive, dangerous, and carry diseases transmissible to other cattle, and they've been underculled in recent years, so no one is sure what's going to happen.

So you hear things where the people are the bad guys, but that doesn't make the problems for people living around these animal populations go away. It's a common oversight by people from (sub)urban areas; because they live in world built by and for humans, they forget they're only a relatively few miles in any direction from unforgiving wilderness.

I live near Yellowstone. No one that I know is concerned about bison roaming outside of Yellowstone. In the park itself, they should allow bison hunting because there are indeed too many. The wolves are at least helping.

I wouldn't be too concerned about horses when deer are already a much much bigger problem.

The solution to problem animals (deer) is not to add more problem animals (wolves) into the mix. The only thing "good" about wolves is that they kill deer. They also kill people.

The proper solution is to encourage hunting. The idea of "deer season" is crazy; they should be hunted continuously. To the extent that it is safe, this should be allowed in suburban neighborhoods and city parks.

Catastrophic negligence by bureaucrats is being prosecuted as we speak http://www.cnn.com/2016/04/20/health/flint-water-crisis-char...

You did say it goes unpunished but having charges filed is a step forward.

IANAL and not in the US but legally 'Negligence' is a tort; it's a civil law matter not typically criminal unless it's Criminal Negligence because you actually kill or injure someone, I think. Someone would have to show how the destruction of the horses caused them damages and if no-one owns them because they are feral, who would this be?

In the USA, the bureaucrats are shielded from individual liability when their actions are under color of their government job. And the government is sovereign, and can only be sued if it chooses to allow the suit.

Thus, almost nothing is ever done.

Hence, you see epidemics of prosecutorial misconduct, for example. Prosecutors go after people they know (or reasonably suspect) to be innocent, withholding exculpatory evidence, etc., just to score the credit of more convictions. Such people ruining the lives of innocent people are almost never (and I really that - it approaches zero) prosecuted themselves.

Do you have any hard evidence to back up these claims about wild mustangs?

> ~1700 protected wild horses

you mean invasive wild horses, don't you ? the ones that were brought here by western conquistadors ?

It doesn't matter where their ancestors came from, if they were categorised as protected.

Play up the (Zika) birth defect angle. Potential parents will be scared to death and will scream at their legislators to do something. There's all the funding they need.

Think of the children!

Isn't zika a real danger? From all the news I've been hearing there could soon ben an epidemic in Florida.

"they could go to jail for misallocation of taxpayer funds" can you site a source where this has happened before...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_of_Bell_scandal came to mind in less than 5 seconds; I'm sure there are many others.

That's a case of corrupt officials using funds to pay themselves more money and other misuses not in the interests of the city. This isn't in the same category as using funds inappropriately for something that is in the interests of taxpayers.

I don't think those two statements invalidate each other.

http://www.hhs.gov/

> Preventing disease, including immunization services

This seems to fall under that. xD

Not really a problem; if everyone is convinced it's safe, the Gates foundation would probably pay for it.

https://www.technologyreview.com/s/601213/the-extinction-inv...

I’ve actually wondered if we should create some kind of ‘blackops’ X-prize. Crowdfund a million dollars in bitcoin and release it to someone who can prove they released a gene drive that wiped these monsters out.

Obviously this would be a major violation of the democratic process, but I feel like the utilitarian ends here justify the means. Should an individual have the power to take a global decision like this? Probably not, but this action is needed because the current GMO debate is so bogged down in unmovable, politically entrenched positions.

The environmental and social justice NGOs who campaign against this technology may be doing the world one of the greatest environmental dis-services we’ve ever seen. Biology is the ultimate sustainable technology, it’s crazy that environmental groups are opposing it’s use so strongly.

Of course, the big problem with utilitarianism is that, in the immortal words of Gandalf, "Even the very wise cannot see all ends."

So you make the best decision you can knowing what you know at the time. The non-utilitarian alternative by definition consists of making a decision that you think is worse.

I think you are vastly understimating the cost of gene engineering.

YC W17? I mean if they can try fusion who knows.

Throw a kickstarter to completely get rid of mosquitoes and you'll have the largest, most successful kickstarter ever seen. Nobody likes mosquitoes, nobody likes malaria.

As someone who suffered the wrath of both malaria and dengue, I can't agree enough.

I'm in East Java with my wife and 1 year old daughter. The rainy season was supposed to end a few weeks ago, but we still have rain, and mosquitos. I wish they would eliminate the two Zika vectors, and the Malaria vector mosquito as well. I am vegetarian for over two years nos, and feel compassion for all living things, except the mosquito. The article made me laugh as well.

The main problem is how do we actually eradicate mosquito's without introducing other severely risks?

For example, one of the popular techniques is releasing genetically modified mosquitoes that are sterile. The problem is we don't know what could happen if/when these modified genes spread into the wider environment

It's a very serious concern, whether or not eradicating mosquitoes will introduce more severe problems

How do sterile mosquitos spread their genes?

(Genuine question! I don't know what the risk is)

Ambiguity strikes again! (I was as puzzled as you are, but I think I figured it out)

The problem is we don't know what happens after/when we introduce those genes into the environment. Humans are spreading the gene by releasing the modified mosquitoes - not them having offspring.

When using sterile mosquitoes, the idea isn't that they pass on their genes, but that they dominate mating and therefore disrupt the breeding cycle. I.e. you release LOTS of sterile males and the normal females spend time mating with them instead of normal males and the population therefore decreases (until you run out of sterile males).

I think the better option (also in the article) is to release engineered males that result on male only offspring. Eventually you run out of females and the species dies off.

> I think the better option (also in the article) is to release engineered males that result on male only offspring. Eventually you run out of females and the species dies off.

This is a double win, since male mosquitos don't bite animals.

makes sense, but how do we 100% ensure nothing unforeseen will go wrong with it? playing god might end up pretty badly if some genetic/other corner case happens

Viruses are the most common way for genes to be transferred. A virus literally goes into the cell of the mosquito and copy's a small portion of its genes and splices it into its own genome, which it can then copy and splice into other organisms.

How would sterile mosquitoes transfer genetic material?

I assume that mutating. We release 1bn sterile mosquitoes, most die, but 1,000 of them have a random mutation on top of the original mutation and become hermaphrodites. Now they reproduce on their own and become invincible microbots that bring zika to the masses.

Of course that could also happen in the wild with some good 'ol cosmic rays and no human intervention.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horizontal_gene_transfer

Pickup by virus or other microorganism. Transposons.

You should definitely checkout - GEM mosquito control - if protecting environment is your real concern.

http://www.appropedia.org/GEM_mosquito_control

You're comparing individual species with an entire family.

Countless animals rely on mosquitoes as a valuable food source. And before someone brings up the tired "mosquito predators all eat things besides mosquitoes" argument, people eat food besides grains. It doesn't mean we wouldn't still be 100% fucked if rice and wheat went extinct overnight.

No one wants to seriously wipe out all 3000+ species of mosquitoes. There are only a few species that are harmful to humans.

How do you propose to kill only certain species of mosquitoes without killing the rest (and intense collateral damage).

Edit: well, I read that article poorly. Sorry!

It's discussed in the article (second page).

A summary would be releasing sterile males and gene drives.

Humans are considered harmful to the world as a whole. There's only one human species that would need to be eliminated to solve that problem. You up for that as well?

Sure thing. Mind if we start with you?

I want to eliminate harmful mosquitoes to benefit humanity.

I place more value on the well being of humanity than I do on that of the rest of the world. In general, I value the well being of the world as a whole, but mostly because it's beneficial to humanity. If we eliminate ourselves, there can be no benefit to humanity--so no, I am not up for that as well.

In this specific case, I don't place any intrinsic value in the life of a mosquito. To me, the only factor in whether it lives or dies should be how much harm or benefit it brings to humanity.

> I don't place any intrinsic value in the life of a mosquito

And Hitler didn't place any intrinsic value in the life of a Jew.

I just don't think it's ok to eliminate a species. Intentional extinction of any species is not ok with me, even if it is a mosquito.

And that's the difference between me and Hitler--I value all human Life.

Other than that reply, I'm going to ignore your Hitler comment.

How much intrinsic value do you place on the life of a mosquito? Would you die to save all mosquitoes? To save half of all mosquitoes? A million mosquitoes? What would you sacrifice to save the life of 1 mosquito?

>I just don't think it's ok to eliminate a species. Intentional extinction of any species is not ok with me, even if it is a mosquito.

Do you value humans more than mosquitoes? Would you eliminate mosquitoes if it meant saving the human race? What if it meant saving half the human race? Saving a billion people? A few million a year?

How about viruses? Do you think we should reintroduce smallpox to the wild?

Maybe you don't consider viruses to be truly alive, so how about bacteria? Are you opposed to eliminating the bacteria that causes anthrax?

How about a more complex lifeform? What are your thoughts on eliminating malaria parasites?

Without us, what is the point of the planet existing? Seriously, who is left to enjoy it. You do realize that all life in planet Earth will die in around a billion years and the only chance of anything surviving beyond that will be left to intelligent life smart enough to leave the planet and take as many species as it can with it.

>You're comparing individual species with an entire family.

The GP may well have done so, but most extreme proposals are to eliminate parts of the genuses Aedes, Anopholes, and Culex - together about 2% of the genetic diversity of the family Culicidae.

>Countless animals rely on mosquitoes as a valuable food source.

I'd be interested in seeing some concrete evidence that this is true; I've looked unsuccessfully. Seems to me that there are a few hyperspecialized predators, but generally mosquito population dynamics are too unpredictable for this to arise.

Spiders ?

threatens the lives of poor people in third world countries, suddenly we're worried about the ecosystem?

I don't know how this will be received. I don't even know how I feel about it. But someone has to ask the tough questions.

Is it evolutionarily prudent to go about saving people who can't save themselves?

our current solution of "let all the poor people die" is not a good one.

I don't think that is our "current solution," the lives of many of the world's "poor" have gotten immeasurably better, health and material wise, since contact with Europeans.

Prior to outside contact sub-Saharan Africans didn't have the wheel, written language, a calendar, buildings greater than 1-story, any mechanical devices, domesticated animals, ...

Efforts against malaria, and for clean water are ongoing. Iodised salt does wonders. The list goes on... I don't know how you got in your mind your "current solution."

Hold on, evolution stopped being the driving force for human development a long time ago.

The question you should be asking is how we can accept that so many people are unable to save themselves because of actions we (developed world) have taken. Both recently and in the past.

evolution stopped being the driving force for human development a long time ago.

Why in the world would you think that? We're still made of genes aren't we? We still sexually reproduce don't we?

because of actions we (developed world) have taken

Stark differences existed between the continents long before colonisation. Stark differences exist in areas that were never colonised.

Some areas that were colonised are now thriving.

As much as we like to flatter ourselves, we are not the cause of all the world's problems.

Nor is the constant haranguing of people who have nothing to do with events decades and centuries past of benefit to anybody.

True. But it's social and cultural evolution that matter now.

Societies and cultures are just the emergent results of the interaction of phenotypes. i.e. Culture and people are one and the same.

So?

Physics is just emergent properties of ... (math?). Chemistry is just emergent properties of physics. Biology is just emergent properties of chemistry.

It's turtles, all the way.

No, you can opt out of the culture you were born into.

Sure, but if you're born in Canada and move to a city in China, then your phenotype is contributing to the cosmopolitan culture of that city, and the culture of the city is contributing to your phenotype.

My first response was pathetic :(

Let's consider biology. Physics and chemistry constrain biological processes and systems, for sure. But the number of distinct proteins based on the same set of amino acids, for example, is arguably unlimited (or at least, huge). Selection may favor one protein over another, and yet have virtually no impact on amino acid structure and diversity. Let alone on atoms, nucleons, quarks, etc.

The same applies to societies and cultures vs peoples.

>>The question you should be asking is how we can accept that so many people are unable to save themselves because of actions we (developed world) have taken. Both recently and in the past.

The developed world (mainly western) has inflicted some atrocities on the other parts but that is not what you trying to picture here. There were countless examples of even the tauted-to-be-benevolent tribal people (e.g. African) attacking and trying to wipe out other tribes throughout the world history.

Alas, currently it has become fashionable to put the entire blame on developed western world. This is propaganda (the one that Marxists and communists also love to spread).

I am not a westerner but I do acknowledge many great deeds done by the westerners in the other parts of the world. Internet, electricity, railways, trucks, roads, aeroplanes, mobile-phones, project Gutenberg, concrete, internet archive, Wikipedia, better agriculture practices, agro machines: take your pick. Also add to that the recent initiatives like MIT OCW.

These things which the western world has given to the entire world there is no parallel such benevolent behaviour in the human history. I am grateful to the developed world for such acts of courage and rising above one's own good and one's own religious sentiments.

I am an Asian, and I do know how mean and malevolent our own people had been and have been even now. Countless massacres and oppressive practices by the Islamists and communists and other tribes and groups.

Personally for me, the projects like Internet, internet archive, Wikipedia and OCW have been so beneficial that I cannot imagine myself educating me without them at such a low cost.

BTW, evolution is a complex phenomena but social structures are also important in overall progress of the society. The western developed societal structure is the best societal structure as of yet.

W.r.t. this it is no wonder, for many people here (including me), the western world seems like heaven.

>There will be an environmental impact, but [...] not from the lack of mosquitoes in the ecosystem

Citation needed.

> There will be an environmental impact, but it will be from hundreds of millions of humans not getting malaria and climbing their way out of property, not from the lack of mosquitoes in the ecosystem. It's still a significant problem, but our current solution of "let all the poor people die" is not a good one.

Ecosystem-wise, let's not forget mosquitoes and their diseases are as much threat as they are content. Hawaii didn't have mosquitoes until the 19th century, they did a number on native bird populations. Mosquitoes negatively affect any species they feed on, not just humans.

And the Aedes aegypti mosquito is an invasive species here in the Florida Keys. Eradicating an invasive species sounds like a good idea to me.

On reddit, I remember seeing something like "Research assures government that killing mosquitos would have no negative effect on world ecology"... right above another thread titled "Scientists underestimate ecological impact of species destruction"...

Do we actually understand Mosquitos role in the planet's eco system?

No, but that isn't even the million dollar question because the answer will never be "yes."

The real question is how certain do we have to be about their role before we decide the gamble is worth it?

In this thread you see wealthy westerners complaining that mosquitos are a nuisance. In many parts of the world they are holocaust-scale killers. It gets to an age old question re: the precautionary principle, and a lot of philosophers have spent a lot of time reasoning about it. No one has a generalizable answer.

Even more on point:

Which is likely to cause more ecological damgage:

1) Wipe out two (of over 3,500) species of mosquito

2) Spray poisons indiscriminately, wiping out many different species of insect, both mosquitos and non-mosquitos?

Don't things eat mosquitos? Do any of those things matter?

lol, did you even read the article?

    There’s little evidence, though, that mosquitoes form a crucial link in any food chain, or that their niche could not be filled by something else.

This little evidence comes from little research.

That people today can still make assertions like that and expect to be taken seriously shows you how little we have learned from earlier "lack of evidence".

Dragonflies eat mosquitos. I happen to like dragonflies. The are one of the non-annoying insects I actually like to have in my (non) backyard.

edit: http://www.chron.com/life/gardening/article/Dragonflies-Moth...

In the UK we don't have human-biting mosquitos, yet we still have plenty of dragonflies.

We have plenty of human biting mosquitos in the UK, I'm quite allergic to some of them.

When I was young, people were encouraged to build homes for Purple Martins, because it was believed that these birds ate a substantial quantity of mosquitos. Later it was discovered that they actually prefer to eat dragonflies. Oops!

No one is talking about wiping out all mosquitos.

It's literally the title of the article

The title is wrong.

Isn't the original article talking about that? "Total Mosquito Destruction"

For those modding this down, yes, that's the link-bait title of the article.

The link-bait title is wrong. No one is seriously talking about eliminating all mosquitos. There's discussion of eliminating two (two) of the over 3,500 species of mosquito, specifically those that carry horrible human diseases.

Maybe you should try reading the article, rather than just the title?

With mosquitos extinct (good riddance) other insects would take their niche.

Their impact as a food source would be negligible.

Before they were introduced by sailing ships, its not like the bug-eating animals did not have enough bugs to eat.

Thanks for bringing this up. Since no one's brought this up already, check out https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mosquito_laser

Wow, that's crazy, a laser/computer combo mounted on fence posts, which is able to determine the type and gender of insect, and only shoot the right kind of disease-carrying mosquitos. "the Photonic Fence can kill up to 50 to 100 mosquitoes a second, at a maximum range of 100 ft."

Also interesting, I thought Intellectual Ventures was only a patent troll, I didn't know they did actual research work as well.

It might be uncharitable to say but it's always been my opinion that their lab and token inventions are cover for their patent trolling activities. Actual inventions from their people are few and far between.

Unfortunately IV purchased all the patents of a company I used to work for, General Magic, after it died. Several of us wanted to open-source Magic's source code, but we'd potentially face prosecution from IV if we did. So much cool stuff there, it's really a pity.

as a side note i remember reading something about some patent trolls using money from suits to actually drive development of promising patents. i do not remember if this was optimism about their true intent or full bs...now i will have to go hunt that down.

When they actually deploy this shit, they'll no longer be a on-practicing entity...

3)Half a million humans that would have died from Malaria, but did not.

This is much more than a million dollar question. I know local economies depending on mosquito larvae winter haul. They sell those to fishermen. Fish populations depends on mosquito larvae in many lake and river ecosystems.

Those economies don't specifically depend on Aedes aegypti.

This is true. But is MBTE specific only to that species? I am pragmatic, I don't care about the "butterfly effect", but I know enough about immune system of Arthropoda, to be sceptical about long term effectiveness of worldwide campaigns and I know enough about development and humanitarian aid projects in the third world to be perfectly sure about bloody huge mismatch between declared and real targets of those campaigns.

Remember human population fertility control effort performed by the US under cover of humanitarian aid in Central Africa less than 30 years ago?

Millions of lives are more important than a few "local economies".

Prohibit cars. Millions of lives are more important than car industry.

This is the right way to frame it; or perhaps try the counterfactual: by not taking action, we are choosing to allow 0.1 Holocausts/year of deaths to occur.

We wipe species off the face of the earth regularly for as little benefit as increasing the land available for soy farming in the Amazon; averting a holocaust per decade seems like a no-brainer when measured on that scale.

Prohibit cars. 1/6 of Holocaust every year will be prevented.

Because the utility of mosquitos is roughly equivalent to the utility of cars.

Duh.

Nope, mosquitoes are far more efficient.

Chesterton's Fence has made the HN rounds lately, but it's again relevant here [1].

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9745149

Yes but fences don't usually kill more than 700k people per year. Its one thing to think carefully about making a change you don't fully understand, its quite another to see great harm done and act to stop it.

Humans (especially first world-ers) have become (somewhat rightfully so) paralyzed with fear about doing anything at all in the environment.

Our 20th century hubris lead us to think that we could fully understand and control our biosphere with unfortunate consequences, but there was a huge dose of optimistic humanism that went along with it. Smallpox was a good, good thing to eradicate.

Someday we will be able to exercise that measured control successfully. We'll probably have to to survive long term on earth no matter how many low-flush toilets we put in. I'm starting to wish to see some of that optimism again and a world without malaria might be just the kind of small step we need to get our mojo back.

I was reminded by your post of Chesterton's fence: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Chesterton%27s_fen...

If the fence would be e.g. electrocuting hundreds of thousands of humans a year, maybe the depth of the due diligence could be somehow limited.

Chesterton's fence applies to things that are built with a purpose. Natural evolution does not meet this criteria; mosquitoes are more like Chesterton's Fallen Tree.

How many species did we wipe before that ? is it a first ?

ps: the only time where humans destroying something made me happy was smallpox.

If the ecological niche of the mosquitoes is a lucrative, rich one, another species will eventually fill it.

As long as there are no drastic effects on the ecosystems involved, (local) extinction of one species is fine. It happens in nature rather regularly, e.g. due to epidemics.

We, the humans, can exert evolutionary pressure to fill the niche of virus-bearing mosquitoes with other species that don't have this trait. The nature will deliver. We can even help by introducing other species, well-known species that could replace the mosquitoes which are going to be exterminated in a more or less controlled way.

One known evolutionary purpose of mosquitos is that "mosquitoes represent a considerable biomass of food for wildlife on the lower rungs of the food chain."[1] so they are feeding the some other species that may or may not have direct impact on humans.

[1]: http://insects.about.com/od/flies/a/10-facts-about-mosquitoe...

>Research assures government that killing mosquitos would have no negative effect on world ecology

Neither would killing of the last few panda (stupid, useless animal), but we wouldn't actually do it. With mosquitoes, do to their large numbers, it would seem like a bit of a gamble. If we're wrong it would be hard to undo killing all the mosquitoes.

Really? Seems like it would be pretty easy to recreate a population of wild type mosquitoes. Just freeze a bunch of eggs.

But that probably won't be necessary. Mosquitoes are too successful to be that easily wiped out. Probably best we can hope for is to get rid of 80-90% of them.

> Just freeze a bunch of eggs. Sadly, I never thought of that. Great point.

Getting rid of 80-90% of them won't do, they reproduce in such large numbers that they'll rebound in a generation or two. You really do have to aim for wiping them out completely.

I'm all for wiping them out totally and forever, but I doubt it's possible. Probably we'll have to settle for 90% and maybe less in the tougher environments like the wet tropics.

Maybe it's just me but a swarm that goes around poking their needles into the bloodstreams of different species, seems like something that MAY have played a very important role in Earth's early ecosystems, like bee transferring pollen, but that role might be vestigial if not outright undesirable now.

Partially, yes. Is huge

This is one of those ideas that sounds genius on its face, until it's actually implemented. Kudzu? Grows fast, prevents erosion, let's pay farmers to till it into the top soil. MTBE? Prevents engine knock, makes for cleaner air, let's mandate its use at the federal level. Whoopsie, once it's in the water we can't get it out, and its a carcinogen.

Let's kill all of the mosquitos because we find their presence unpleasant. Well, that's done and...oh, shit. Turns out there was a value to mosquitos after all. Anyone think to save some of that DNA?

People living in malaria zones find mosquitos a little more than "unpleasant".

Same with Dengue Fever. I spent a month in Bali last summer with a group of 40 people, 4 of which got Dengue. 10%.

What were you doing there?

Hopefully vacationing. Bali is beautiful.

Mongolia is beautiful too. No dengue, no malaria.

Being a "digital nomad"? :)

Chairman Mao thought killing all the sparrows in China (part of his Four Pests Campaign[1]) would be a great idea because they ate laborers' grain seed. But then the population of crop-eating insects ballooned, causing the Great Chinese Famine to get a lot worse. Tens of millions starved to death.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Pests_Campaign

Related: because there was a bounty on rats the farmers started growing rats secretly.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobra_effect

Mosquitos aren't about unpleasantness though: It is a vector for deadly disease in the tropics. We are talking hundreds of thousands of deaths a year.

Now, getting rid of all of them might not be the smartest idea: it carries plenty of risk, but to say that they are just unpleasant is a major understatement.

We should just cure these diseases. Vector control is fucking hard, we've been trying it for a century without really fixing the problem. That isn't likely to change; therapeutic interventions, however, can keep getting better and cheaper.

With the risk being that we breed immunity into the population, seeing as it's still being carried and evolving in its carriers (the mosquitos).

FWIW, we could "cure" a lot of these diseases. We have, in rich parts of the world. If the option was between "we distribute cures to forgotten diseases to everyone who needs them" versus "we take a gamble and murder all the mosquitos," I might agree the former would be the better bet.

That's not the choice we're given because not enough people in the first world want to step up in a serious enough way.

It doesn't really take that many people; these need not be expensive programs. It's a matter of political will, but a serious vector control program would be no different.

In any event, learning how to control human diseases and prevent parasites from killing us seems like a very fundamental goal of medicine which should be accomplished in any eventuality. Eradicating mosquitoes need not be.

Also, regarding resistance, it is much easier to track and defeat resistance in human patients than to track and defeat resistance in wild populations of mosquitoes, which is what we'll be doing if we try eradication campaigns.

" Vector control is fucking hard, we've been trying it for a century without really fixing the problem. That isn't likely to change"

With CRISPR and gene drive, it changes from "fucking hard" to "trivial", so it is not only likely to change, it's already changed.

Can you show me an actual program using CRISPR and gene drive that's produced some effective changes? As far as I know this is still in the realm of theory. And given that we're talking about a single resistance mechanism, I'm going to guess that it will very quickly be defeated by evolution.

DDT was the "perfect" mosquito killer, as well. It didn't last - resistance inevitably follows these attempts in wild populations.

Can you show me an actual program using CRISPR and gene drive that's produced some effective changes?

So your argument is that it can't be done because no one has done it?

No one has released gene drive systems to the wild, but there is every reason to believe that it will work fine, and no credible reason to believe that it won't.

Err, I can give you a credible reason to believe that it won't: the parasite will inevitably develop resistance.

Here is the paper where they talk about the mechanism of resistance being conferred on the mosquito: http://www.pnas.org/content/109/28/E1922.abstract

The mechanism is this: "These scFvs are derived from antibodies specific to a parasite chitinase, the 25 kDa protein and the circumsporozoite protein, respectively."

So you'll spend a ton of money building a fancy CRISPR system in your mosquitoes, release them into the wild, and in a matter of months you will have parasites with on-target mutations in these proteins that will allow them to evade your resistance mechanism. I'd lay $1000 on this without blinking.

You're basically talking about curing malaria in mosquitoes. Why not, instead, just cure malaria in humans?

First, you're confusing wiping out the mosquito species with giving the mosquitos resistance to the malaria parasite. Those are two different things.

Second, there is no reason that a CRISPR-based system is limited to a single target. Will you also lay $1,000 against a system that targets ten species-unique sequences at once?

You're basically talking about curing malaria in mosquitoes.

Neither I nor the article is talking about that. It's a discussion of making the mosquito species itself extinct.

> First, you're confusing wiping out the mosquito species with giving the mosquitos resistance to the malaria parasite. Those are two different things.

You're the one who brought up CRISPR and gene drive. Perhaps you should read the actual paper: http://www.pnas.org/content/112/49/E6736.full; you'll see that the proposal is entirely about giving mosquitoes resistance to the malaria parasite, not about eradication. That is, the goal is to eliminate the parasite in mosquito populations (i.e., cure malaria in mosquitoes), not to kill mosquitoes.

>Second, there is no reason that a CRISPR-based system is limited to a single target. Will you also lay $1,000 against a system that targets ten species-unique sequences at once?

Yes. On-target mutations are trivial to produce, and alleles segregate independently.

"You're the one who brought up CRISPR and gene drive. "

Which can be targeted to eliminate the mosquitos themselves.

"Perhaps you should read the actual paper"

The actual paper? Like there's only one? Hint: there's more than one way to use this technology, and more than one group working with it.

"On-target mutations are trivial to produce, and alleles segregate independently."

I think you're misunderstanding what "independently" means in this context.

If the probability of a mutation that will get around one targeted sequence is (say) 1 in a million, that's almost certainly going to happen, just because there are billions of mosquitos.

However, if you target (say) ten independent sequences, the probability of any one organism having resistance to all of them is going to be 1 in (1 million)^10 = 1 in 10^60 and that is basically not going to happen. It does no good in this case for one organism to be resistant with respect to one target, while another organism is resistant with respect to another target, because all of the targets will have fatal outcomes. The only way for the organism to survive would be for it to be resistant to all of them at the same time, from the beginning.

And there's no reason why you'd have to stop at 10, either.

You should go read about MRSA, which shouldn't exist according to your logic. You also are misunderstanding how independent assortment of alleles work.

Because plasmodium is a eukaryotic species which reproduces sexually, on-target resistance mutations to any number of mechanisms can arise independently in a bunch of different organisms and accumulate through selection + allele segregation. It's also very easy to produce these sorts of mutations, since it is trivial to change an amino acid to disrupt antibody binding/recognition without altering the function of the protein.

>Which can be targeted to eliminate the mosquitos themselves.

This is incorrect; the whole point of a gene drive is that it causes increased propagation of a trait in the mosquito population. What you're describing is a very different strategy, since a trait that kills the mosquito obviously cannot propagate. It can also be achieved much more simply by using sterile males to outcompete fertile males and reduce the population ('sterile insect' technique); however, this technique only works on small populations and almost certainly wouldn't work in Anopheles or some such.

> With CRISPR and gene drive, it changes from "fucking hard" to "trivial", so it is not only likely to change, it's already changed.

The kind of hubris displayed here almost certainly belies deep ignorance. Please, doctor, tell us how trivial editing DNA is.

>We should just cure these diseases.

Much, much easier said than done.

It is just the application of money, time and effort. Total global funding for malaria research is ~ half a billion dollars. I imagine if we, say, multiplied this by ten, it would have a susbstantial effect on improving outcomes.

This could easily be framed as a misattribution of cause though.

Mosquitos occur world-wide, and even flourish in many climates where rates of infection from mosquito-borne diseases are relatively low. As an example, 90% of deaths from Malaria occur in sub-Saharan Africa, and even there, the likelihood of death from infection is radically lower for western visitors than for locals.

These diseases are largely a result of poverty and poor access to healthcare, not of mosquitos.

So we get as many cases of malaria in Europe, just nobody dies from it? Or maybe it does indeed has something to do with mosquitos after all?

There was malaria in Sweden a couple of hundred years ago, and we still have a few mosquitos. It was never a big problem but malaria went away when it couldn't spread efficiently, largely because of better houses and hygiene such as not keeping the cattle in the same house (room) as the people. Also a lot of breeding ground was dried out and converted to farm land.

I'm all for releasing CRISPR on the worst species of mosquitos though. And ticks. They can't serve any function other than killing a few persons each year due to TBE.

It's sad when a chain of logical reasoning points out (again) how weird it is that we cannot solve the real problem, which is "Why is there a third world in the first place?"

Why does there have to be a region in permanent squalor? Why can't every place on earth where civilization exists be a decent place for humans to live, with peace, opportunity and sanitation?

But ... back down to earth. Since we can't fix that larger problem, at least maybe we can stop malaria by killing all the mosquitoes.

Malaria and other mosquito-borne diseases are actually a big reason why there is a third world.

Really? How so? (Not attacking ... sincere question).

Seems to me that good second-world sanitation might alleviate it. But third world countries lack the sanitation and hence suffer Malaria. Seems the problem is political/social.

anti-mosquito sanitation is relatively expensive, compared to other forms of sanitation.

I'd guess that the climate in Sweden helps too, so I still think we need CRISPR.

Coincidentally, there are quite many areas in Sweden were it is impossible to go outside in the summer without mosquito nets, and it is worsening.

Actually there are some in Crimea and some in Bulgaria. Literally less than 100 cases in 10 years, mostly imported, not endemic. Treated in hospitals.

The WHO recently declared Europe "malaria free". http://uk.reuters.com/article/us-health-europe-malaria-idUKK...

It seems that at least some of the reason why malaria is so prevalent in sub-Sahara Africa has to do with poor housing, poor management of drainage / sewers, and poor roads.

http://www.hindawi.com/journals/jtm/2012/819563/

I'm not ruling out eliminating mosquitoes per se, but the United States and Europe managed to largely eliminate malaria in the 1930s-1940s without eliminating mosquitoes. So before I'd start advocating the elimination of entire subsets of species, I'd ask how the US and Europe were successful in their efforts, and wonder why we can't apply those lessons to the rest of the world. Maybe the money spent in targeting the elimination of mosquitoes (which cause a lot of problems) would be better spent in general health and sanitation (the lack of which also causes a lot of problems), for instance.

I'm not sure where I suggested there are as many cases in Europe?

Mosquitoes do exist in Europe; they don't spread malaria because it isn't there to spread, and it isn't there to spread because of effective healthcare.

(Europe isn't a great example as the mosquito population is not exactly high, which I guess is climate-related, but the above is also true of parts of the developed world where their populations are higher)

Exactly, we are talking about millions of people if you go back a few thousand years.

Millions of people if you go back a few years

You know, mathematically speaking, each of us had about 20 million ancestors, if we go back in time. All of them dead now. So what?

Perhaps do a pilot test in a limited area and see the impact?

If I recall correctly, that was done in Panama by the canal builders; one of the reasons they were successful was because they wiped out mosquitoes in the region, and protected the workers from malaria.

Their method was to put a bit of gasoline in all of the swamps. The thin layer of gas on the water surface killed the larvae. It probably caused lots of other environmental damage too though, so a different approach would be needed today.

Malaria used to be endemic in much of the US.

http://www.cdc.gov/malaria/about/history/elimination_us.html

I guess they were pretty close to eradicating mosquitoes in transmission areas once they started the control effort.

A similar tactic was used in Cuba and New Orleans to combat yellow fever. [1] They used a layer of oil rather than gasoline though.

[1] http://exhibits.hsl.virginia.edu/yellowfever/new_strategies/

There will be side effects, but could it really be worse than the alternative? That is, one million deaths per year.

They very well could be. That's just it -- we don't know. And when we kill them all off, are we going to be able to reverse it when we find out that the result is causing two million deaths per year?

Which is why people are studying the issue, writing papers and popular articles, instead of just doing it.

Despite the link-bait headline, no one is talking about killing off all mosquitos.

And yes, gene drives can be reversed.

Under what hypothetical scenario would killing off mosquitos cause two million (human?) deaths per year?

What if the diseases that depend on mosquitoes to spread mutate/evolve themselves to spread via air...

You know, "life finds a way" and all that..

Easy. Untold side effect of MTBe caused infertility in 50% of cases in second generation of black women in treated regions. Entire country was depopulated in 25 years. Like that research article from 2056?

The worst man-made ecological disasters in history caused tens of thousands of deaths. We can say with certainty that killing off a few species of mosquitoes will not be worse.

You're suggesting that because it's never happened before (that we know of), we can say with _certainty_ it won't happen in the future? Can we go back 100 years and say that about climate change please?

1 million is a really big number, which is what makes the certainty easy. That's even bigger than projected deaths from climate change.

You certaintyometer needs to be tuned. Around 129.000 people died in Hiroshima and Nagasaki and at least 200.000 people killed in Chernobyl until data. And this is a child's play compared with the >85 millions of humans killed by a worst ecological disaster. We can say with certainty that nobody thought in ancient times that those small and clean rodents, living peacefully in the grasslands and steppes of Central Asia were something to worry. Rats in Europe were not unlike the good species of mosquito if we think about it, with their own diseases and new random relationships...

They aren't a random niche animal. Mosquitoes are pollinators and a major food source for many, many other animals. We know that "pollinator" and "major food source" can be critical roles in an ecosystem.

+1. But they are not the only ones. However, I 'd rather observe tropical ecosystems for 10 more years before making such a radical effort. Like I said earlier, no one is eradicating cars just because more than a million humans die in car accidents every year.

Of course. Do you eat pesticides for breakfast?

How do you supposedly kill mosquitoes without chemical dangerous products? Products that will kill people with cancer, asthma or birth defects.

How do you kill mosquitoes without killing bees and other useful insects that pollinize most of the agrarian production?

Most people ignore that on their own(using just wind to pollinize) the food that we cultivate the food production would be 5 percent or 10% of the current production. 50% of the world population will starve.

Bees already died en masse after the introduction of new pesticides, that had to be delayed in lots of places to study how they were accepting bees.

The healthier bees today live on cities like Paris which had forgotten pesticides in parks. The irony.

Ignorant people are very dangerous. Most people, specially experts on a specific field, are ignorant in most of the other areas.

Near my house there is a river 30 years ago some smart ass though it was a good idea to introduce an alien species of fish into it. No problem, the new fish was small and won't eat the local fish, they said.

Genius! The new fish eat all the eggs of local native population, that basically become extinct as a result.

Read the article before commenting.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sterile_insect_technique

I'll tell you how. Species-specific virus, like the one we developed in 1974 for controlling populations of gypsy moth.

At a certain point you're saving people so they can starve to death. That's the worst case. Best case: saving them speeds up how soon we run out of non-renewable resources. What's more merciful to mankind as a whole in the long run? I'd say it's keeping the planet in good shape, and I don't see how eradicating malaria can do anything but hurt that goal.

When mortality rates fall, birth rates typically fall more.

MBTE is unconfirmed as a carcinogen except at very high doses and can be efficiently and economically removed from water with simple bioreactors. It is better than either lead additive or the health effects of increased pollution from inferior combustion from increased knocking. It is in fact used medically to dissolve gallstones by way of injecting it into the gallbladder. It is not required to be added to gasoline; while there are laws requiring oxygenates to be added, MTBE is not required and there are alternatives. Do your research better.

MTBE...can be efficiently and economically removed from water with simple bioreactors.

That wasn't the case fifteen years ago. Mandating something, then hoping we come up with an inexpensive way to clean up the mess later probably isn't a good long-term plan.

It is in fact used medically to dissolve gallstones by way of injecting it into the gallbladder.

Arsenic has medicinal uses, too. I'll swing by the house later to drop some in the water inlet of your house.

MTBE is not required and there are alternatives

When the alternatives are more expensive, MTBE has been effectively "required". Perhaps it is not the current case, but it most certainly was in years past.

Do your research better.

You mean do my research such that my conclusions match yours? Or did you just have a nice, cold glass of Uncalled-for-Snark(tm) with your breakfast this morning?

I did some more looking around. Oral MTBE is a carcinogen at levels above 200mg/kg/day in rats. When inhaled it has acute toxic effects before it has carcinogenic effects. MTBE tastes bad enough to render drinking water unpalatable at levels around 10ug/l. So you basically can't drink enough to give yourself cancer.

Calling it a persistent pollutant is perfectly fine. It's bad enough to make entire aquifers taste bad until you put in the hardware to clean it out. What it isn't is a problematic carcinogen.

"Because of the intense odor (and taste) of MTBE, humans will not tolerate either air or water concentrations sufficient to produce the cytotoxic precursors required to promote cellular proliferation." http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1539-6924.1997....

> Arsenic has medicinal uses, too.

Not for its macroscopic physical properties it doesn't.

> I'll swing by the house later to drop some in the water inlet of your house.

Just be sure to stick to things like the EPA exposure limits and so on.

> That wasn't the case fifteen years ago. Mandating something, then hoping we come up with an inexpensive way to clean up the mess later probably isn't a good long-term plan.

That's fair.

> You mean do my research such that my conclusions match yours? Or did you just have a nice, cold glass of Uncalled-for-Snark(tm) with your breakfast this morning?

I'll admit that a little bit of it is snark. I find that the kind of person that's most vulnerable to misleading science is also pretty vulnerable to snark. But, no, I really did mean that you needed to do more research.

I am all for environment and sustainability, but in case of mosquitoes, even I would draw an exception! You have to be in a tropical country to know how many nights they spoil and how much effort it is, everyday, to keep yourself insulated -- all those Aerosols, sprays, nets... So much effort and resources. They are under the desks, in corners, in gardens, everywhere.. they seriously affect the lifestyle in a bad way.

I used to think Kudzu was really bad until I read this:

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/true-story-kudz...

Not saying it was a good idea to plant Kudzu but there are far worse invasive plants to deal with.

Yeah I'm surprised that most sources still cite those junk stats from the 1970's and 90's.

> we find their presence unpleasant

It's a bit more then "unpleasant" I would say

Kudzu is great for erosion and its invasiveness in the Southeastern US is GREATLY exaggerated. Apparently the 1996 survey that is most cited greatly overestimated the number of hectares covered.

Stuff in the south in general grows really, really fast.

I'm not a scientist, but I know from movies that the amber is filled with mosquitos.

Now: to ensure we're only extracting the mosquito DNA and not the dino DNA...

Or it could be like air bags and seat belts: certainly responsible for its share of issues, but far fewer than what it prevents.

What if they keep a bunch of unaltered mosquitoes in captivity while eradicating them in the wild? Then if it does have some unanticipated effect the change may be reversible. (Of course it's possible the re-released mosquitoes will be out-competed by whatever's moved in in their absence, but you've got a better chance than if you didn't keep a backup.)

Sometimes I wonder if the relentless human intervention in every aspect of nature will create or leave only life that has a value to people, like cows and wheat, or that which can resist domination or destruction by humans, like HIV, treatment-resistant bacteria, and the unassailable cockroach.

Perhaps after a period of rapid upheaval, humanity develops the technology to capture and control those super powerful flora and fauna, and use them for our own devices.

Then we can finally become Pokemon trainers.

I suspect our ecosystem would collapse and humanity itself would be collateral damage before that actually came to pass, maybe I'm overly pessimistic though.

Given what we've achieved in the last 200 years I wouldn't put it past us to terraform the entire Earth into a giant garden,

> Under the FAO's definitions above, agricultural land covers 38.4% of the world's land area as of 2011 [1]

You could argue we already have.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agricultural_land

Of all of Larry Niven's SF, perhaps the most likely future is his Svetz stories. That is to say an overpopulated, polluted world with a global and imperial bureacracy, bereft of any life save man and yeast.

> create or leave only life that has a value to people

There is a Jewish creation story (Rashi, Genesis 1:11) that God told the trees to make their bark (or the wood itself) edible to humans. The trees refused because "if we did that humans would eat all of us, leaving none behind".

It seems to me that the trees got it wrong: Plants that are valuable to humans exist in far greater numbers than those that are not.

Fascinating. Maybe that's the point of the story? It's not as if the ancient Hebrews were unfamiliar with agriculture. Perhaps the meaning is that people should listen to God even if it seems counterintuitive, because you could be more wrong than you (a puny mortal) could possibly understand.

That was really interesting. Thanks for that.

The meaning to you or the meaning to the ancient?

If the latter, I'm not sure if people back then were so megalomaniac to consider being useful to humans as an advantage. The world was much less developed before steam engines gave us craploads of energy for free.

I'm pretty sure that people back then were rather clear on the idea that if something you put in the ground makes food and seeds you're gonna want to keep the seeds to make more.

But then you become a slave of those pesky humans and their whims, while trees grow freely in forests where they didn't face much danger from humans before the industrial revolution.

There's a fun little Roman bedtime story about a determined man who cuts down an important god's favorite forest for firewood and is cursed with insatiable hunger that eventually drives him to sell all of his possessions and even his daughter into slavery before he eats himself to death.

Needless to say, people were a threat to forests long before industrialization.

Actually in Europe there was heavy deforestation between 1100 and 1500 already.

Yeah, I was looking for information on pre-industrial deforestation and found that too. Apparently, deforestation was also a problem in the vicinity of some ancient cities.

It depends on how long it takes to grow a tree.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old-growth_forest#Logging_in_o...

Harpers magazine had an article on just this: Planet of Weeds by David Quammen

http://www.botany.wisc.edu/courses/botany_422/readings/Quamm...

Mosquitoes is not just about the macro-ecosystem. Blood sucking animals actually help micro-organism maintain their biodiversity by allowing DNA from very different environment to mixup. Killing mosquitos would be like killing bees (which we are).

Also you may think that most organism causing diseases are bad, but they can be actually useful in your own organism most of the time, and only trigger a disease once their population is out of control or when your body is not tuned correctly anymore.

Killing everything that seems to affect us in a bad way could snow ball into terrible consequences. Not to say I'm not glad that the plague is out of the picture, but everything is not "plague-level".

BTW: I have malaria. I hate mosquitos. I still believe we should not eradicate mosquitos.

Why haven't we talked about possibly engineering Aedes that cannot carry the virus and release those into the wild to spread their resistant genes to other Aedes? I don't know if this is practical, or even possible - I just have yet to see any solution other than the typical human "kill the threat" response.

I agree with you.

"Let's get rid of all these natural population controls!"

Sounds like the beginning of a bad post-apocalypse movie.

I'm disappointed that the prevailing sentiment is applying the precautionary principle. We didn't create a technological civilization by being absolutely sure of all possible consequences before acting. That approach would have paralyzed us. Technology is a boon. It's done some harm, but a whole lot of good. Let's not throw up our hands and decide that we're no longer comfortable modifying our environment to suit us.

There is a long list of things about our technological civilization that would have benefited from applying the precautionary principle a little more. We're in damage control mode right now for a large number of environmental catastrophes, our agricultural techniques of the last half-century or so have depleted and desertified a large amount of prime arable land, we're rapidly shooting ourselves in the foot by abusing antibiotics, and we have some huge problems with war, poverty, and other kinds of social strife. In my opinion, we should be learning to think deeply through consequences instead of looking at our track record and saying "let's do more of that." We don't need to be absolutely sure, but given our history I think we could probably strive to be /more/ sure before we make irreversible changes.

I see where you'd coming from, but it's easy to see the costs now that we're so utterly used to the benefits. Use of filthy, polluting energy sources was a necessary stepping stone for the industrial revolution. There was no way to go directly from Newcomen's engine to ITER. Sure, the process left us with some problems to solve, but compared to the alternative, they're good problems to have. If we'd applied the precautionary principle, knowing what we know now, we'd never have had an industrial revolution, nor a green revolution, and we wouldn't be here to talk about it.

(upvoted) It's hard to predict the alternate present from a notional past. I agree that the things we did were necessary stepping stones on the path to technology that likely could not have been avoided. We might have done it more slowly and with more limited scale and still made it to where we are now (over a longer time span), and I have no idea if that would have had better results or not. The real question for me is, now that we do have this perspective, can we make our future decisions better than our past decisions? We're now at a point where the global system has far less excess capacity to absorb our blunders. In resilience speak[1], it seems to me like we're in the late conservation phase, which typically precedes rapid release (collapse) and reorganization. We have evidence of this in the critical slowing down[2] of adaptive responses from a variety of present-day systems ranging from corals to economies. From my perspective, provoking a system in that condition feels a lot like playing with a doomsday footgun.

I don't think that killing off mosquitoes will be the final insult that causes cataclysmic ecosystem collapse; that seems pretty far-fetched. However, I don't know that, and I do think we should strive to have strong evidence for the costs and benefits of any irreversible change we make to our world at this point.

1. http://www.resalliance.org/adaptive-cycle

2. https://www.quantamagazine.org/20151117-natures-critical-war...

Eventually, a researcher who is genuinely responsible instead of merely professionally so will conduct the X-chromosome shredding experiment in the wild. There won't be publicity at first, but if it works as well as the Chickens Little fear then eventually, after the hymns of praise to the heavens have resounded for a few years, the researcher will reveal the key to a hash she had published years earlier. That hash will be found to be of her lab notes on the day she released the selfish gene into the wild and destroyed a scourge upon humanity for good.

Not only will this be good for the millions of human children who won't die, but we'll gain a better understanding of ecological principles at which we can now only guess. This isn't the last species we'll want to change, but there may only be a few we want to eliminate this way. The knowledge gained in the anti-Anopheles project will be useful for less destructive efforts as well.

I'm a vegetarian for spiritual reasons and also because I don't agree with causing suffering to other species.

If there's a fly in my room, buzzing on the window, I would open the window and let it fly away. If there's a big ant or a spider or a bee on my foot, I'd wait for it to explore me and then go on its way (although I'm scared of spiders and allergic to bee stings).

But even a hardcore flower sniffing fly kissing hippy like myself has his limit. And that limit is called The Mosquito.

I've sent so many bad vibes towards this species that they'd stopped biting me years ago. Even so, I still hate them for the sleepless nights and for the crazy, bad, aggressive thoughts that they've spawned inside my mind with their evil buzz.

One of the worst things about them is that it takes just one slap - 50 ms - to transform a living, buzzing mosquito into a bloody spot on the wall. They don't even have time to understand wtf has happened to them !

One moment she's like "Yeah! Who I should suck next?!" and next moment she's mush.

No pain, no regrets, no suffering. Nothing !

Yet I have to live with the memory of the suffering it has caused me my entire life.

Maybe we should design mosquitoes with more advanced nervous systems - optimized for feeling pain and suffering - and make their bodies more resistant and stronger, so that humans can torture them properly.

This "let's interbreed them with sterile males" sounds like a really soft and humane (?) punishment - give them lab grown mosquito studs so that those bloodsucking bitches can have a good sex life ? What kind of revenge is that ?

No! They must suffer !

Oh my, you see what thoughts they've spawned in me ? Otherwise, I'm pretty peaceful..

/humor

>Maybe we should design mosquitoes with more advanced nervous systems - optimized for feeling pain and suffering - and make their bodies more resistant and stronger, so that humans can torture them properly.

You're scaring me (wo)man!

I remember reading some old tale about all the animals gathering to decide what to do about humanity. Every animal hated humans, so they all voted to destroy us. Except the mosquito, which was the only one to stand up for us because they needed food. The moral of the story was that in return for looking out for us, we should let mosquitoes drink what they need from us.

(not my story, I read it in a history book about India)

I remember reading the same story, however in this case I'm not sure how the metaphor should be applied

So if I steal food from you every day and some of my friends want to kill you, and I say "no, don't kill him, I need him so I can steal food", you should give me food every day as thanks?

Well in order for this comparison to work, you'd be programmed on a deep level to take from him in order to sustain your own life. Your choice of the word 'steal' implies that the mosquito understands the morality of theft but just doesn't care.

Then again I tend to read way too far into things, my bad.

The problem is not mosquitos drinking small amounts of our blood. The problem is that in doing so they infect people with diseases like Malaria, effectively killing thousands of people every year.

I like the story, though.

Those people, if they survived, would have gone on to cause far more ecological damage to the planet than they otherwise did. Until we figure out how to colonize other solar systems, endeavors to spare every human life from such naturally occurring population controls seems foolishly good-hearted.

Fables are crafted to convey the moral, rather than deriving the moral from natural circumstance.

I recall reading a tale with animals interacting with a human. There was something about the chicken wanting to be saved from the wolf, so it gave the human its eggs. The cow wanted to be saved from the wolf, so it gave the human its milk. The horse wanted to be saved from the wolf, so it gave the human its strength and speed. They all end up slaughtered and eaten by the human and his "dog" (a.k.a. the wolf) when they were no longer useful in any other way. The chicken stopped laying. snap The cow stopped milking. slice The horse went lame. bang The moral of the story was essentially, "hahahaha, you stupid animals got played!"

On a side note, any animal story where the dog does not side with the human is clearly bunkum. And in any animal U.N., clearly, the human is a veto-wielding permanent member of the security council, so the mosquito, the North Korea of unpopular animals, was just sucking up to a major power to get more food aid. And in that case, we should let the mosquito go pound sand, because they will never stop being annoying little jerks.

Seems like it would be relatively easy to preserve large captive populations of existing mosquito species, then kill everything in the wild. If we notice some tragic consequence, ctrl+z.

Lol that is a good idea.

There's no guarantee that re-releasing the mosquitos would undo the damage. If wiping out mosquitos causes some other species that relies on them to go extinct, we might not notice until another species that relies on them starts suffering too.

There's an excellent 20min Radiolab you can listen to that was released in 2014, explaining how the genetically modified male mosquitos work: http://www.radiolab.org/story/kill-em-all/

One (single) notable role mosquitos played was stopping early settlements from inhabiting and destroying much of the world's rainforests... "nature's Viet Cong".

Probably I'm biased because I had a dengue fever infection a few years ago, but I don't understand the commenters here. Humanity as a whole burns millions of tonnes of coal, manufacturing millions of tonnes of products which are just thrown away, releasing who knows what chemicals into the rivers and oceans, not to mention the radioactive waste. And seriously you are worried about killing mosquitos?

Sounds good, but afaik only a few mosquito species actually are spreaders of diseases affecting humans. I suppose I don't know if those pathogens can mutate to use other mosquitoes as hosts.

While we're at it, get rid of ticks.

Hey I'm concerned about the biters too, as well as the disease carriers. Get rid of both and I'll tolerate the rest buzzing around in my ear. :)

+chiggers

We've already got a good start on guinea worms (they'd already be gone if it weren't for a set of superstitious, fuckface warlords in certain African countries).

Other prime candidates:

Pediculus humanus (human louse, including the head and body subspecies).

Pthirus pubis (crab louse)

Onchocerca volvulus (causes river blindness)

Trichomonas vaginalis (causes nasty vaginal infections, and can be carried and spread by men)

Ascaris lumbricoides (giant human roundworm)

I believe all of these are parasites specific to human beings, and find it highly unlikely that wiping them out would cause any significant ecological catastrophe.

Those who disagree would be welcome to serve as hosts a fallback population, so we could restore them if it became necessary. Concerned about Aedes aegypti mosquitos? Sign up to serve as a blood donor for them. You can help save the species, at the small cost of yellow fever, dengue, chikungunya, and (apparently) zika.

What, that doesn't sound like a good deal? Then why are you willing to wish that fate on others? Especially unwilling others?

Sorry for any sarcasm, but it's quite disturbing to see First Worlders condemning Third Worlders to horrible deaths because of ecowhacko "concerns" about friggin' mosquitos.

As long as we're making lists, add Cimex lectularius (common bed bugs). I'm tempted to toss the entire Cimicidae family into a gene incinerator from the outset, but I'll settle for wiping them out one species at a time. But nuke the mosquitoes that are proven viral vectors first; Cimicidae species if they transmit at all, transmit in very rare instances.

and botflies, no-see-ums, and black flies.

I hate those bastards. I don't care if it causes an eco-catastrophe. Just don't want to be bitten anymore.

I am astonished by the comments in this thread. Many people seem to assume that the chance of disaster as a result of wiping out mosquitoes is high - a sentiment I can only assume arises from having watched a lot of movies with the Arrogant And Foolish Scientist's Ill-Thought-Out Plan Backfires plot. It is good to think through consequences, but supposing that real world scientists acting deliberately and collaboratively will make the same mistakes that movie scientists make for the sake of drama - I find that a concerningly distorted perception of reality.

It's sort of like the people who react to robotics with concerns that the robots will go rogue and turn on their creators. Yeah, this is like a 90% probability event in movies, but that does not make it a reasonable thing to worry about in the real world.

Yeah, of course we should carefully think through the consequences before acting. That's what is happening. But if the mosquito experts say the ecological impact is likely to be negligible, then it probably will be. These guys are experts. Species go extinct all the time, and life goes on because it's pretty robust.

I'm not saying scientists are all knowing and can foresee all side effects, though I suspect if they are willing to state a view like that with confidence, they won't be far off. What I'm saying is the ZOMG BIRDS EAT MOSQUITOS and WHAT IF WE INFECT OURSELVES AND GET WIPED OUT talk is a little silly. Cool it there, Spielberg. ;)

1 mosquitos only carries diseases, many other species do this, for example rats spread the plague in the dark ages, even infected humans spread diseases.

2 there is no expert or science that can fully understand the whole ecosystem and how it works, mosquitos and many insects are at the base of the food chain, the impact will probably be a domino effect that will make many other species extinct, where will this lead? nobody knows, it's like playing with fire.

Wiping out entire species to solve the spread of a virus is not only inefficient (there are other ways it can spread) and dumb but also dangerous, it's like a solution of an infant that can only think destroy destroy.

We need creative and intelligent ideas for hard problems, not simple and stupid infant like ideas, and hn is a place where people with such ideas gather this is why you see more of these comments.

there is no expert or science that can fully understand the whole ecosystem and how it works, mosquitos and many insects are at the base of the food chain, the impact will probably be a domino effect that will make many other species extinct, where will this lead? nobody knows

Ok, this. This is the chain of reasoning I'm talking about.

It is the very height of hubris to say that the people who manage and study ecosystems don't understand them, and to imply that they are ignorant of something so basic as the food chain. I don't understand where this is coming from.

And there will probably be a domino effect that will wipe out many species? "Probably"? Like, more than 50% odds? Really?

When multiple professionals are willing to go on record saying the impact will likely be negligible, what makes you so darn sure they're wrong? The only place I can imagine this is coming from is some combination of "Science is Hard" and "Nature Messes You Up Whenever You Mess With It In The Movies"!

Food chain is not something basic or simple, maybe only as a a very abstract concept, because our lives and of other species depend on it and this makes it very important and should be treated carefully.

For example another insect that might seem not important to the food chain, the bee, is crucial for agriculture and for our food.

If you don't understand the domino effect part you should study a little bit about birds, reptiles and other species that feed on mosquitoes and then you can look higher in the chain on what other animals feed on that birds and reptiles and you will understand how many species will be affected.

Scientists unfortunately can't predict effects in very complex systems, not even the most complex computers can simulate something that looks very simple like the weather, this is why we can never predict it accurately and for long periods of time even if we have a lot of data.

As I said effects on complex systems can't be predicted by scientists, maybe only in a very limited superficial way, if this weren't true we wouldn't have fukushima, cernobal, oil spills, plastic island in the ocean, increased ocean acidity etc, scientists would have everything in control.

Science is cool and is a marvelous tool for knowledge but don't underestimate it's limitations.

We have a TON of mosquitos in the late spring through late autumn seasons. Those asian tiger mosquitos. They bite all day long. You can't go out and expect to avoid them unless you're doused in Off, and even then it's no guarantee.

Last year my daughter got bit so badly that both of her legs looked like she had a huge rash. It was just a string of mosquito bites combined with a sensitivity to them that exaggerated an already rough problem.

All that said, I'm not sure I'm pro-extermination. We have a lot of bats that come around and eat the mosquitos around dusk. I'm sure they'd find other things to eat, but I like seeing them skim the pool for a drink and then eat a few dozen skeeters while they dart around. I also don't like people playing god with this type of stuff. The butterfly effect is real, and if we exterminate them all, we won't know what the effect is until it's already too late. Realistically, the earth adapts to whatever we do to it. Long after we're gone, there will be tons of interesting life forms. That still doesn't make me any less uneasy about it.

I don't know.

For the purpose of disease control it's not strictly necessary to exterminate all mosquitos. Mosquito borne diseases are transmitted when a mosquito bites an infected person, becomes infected itself, and later bites another person. So long as mosquitos can be eliminated from the populated areas of a region, even if only for a couple of months, the infected mosquitos will die off, and the people infected with the diseases will eventually (hopefully) recover. By the time new generations of mosquitos reach these populated areas, they will no longer be infected, there will be no infected people for them to bite, and the disease will be eradicated.

Such a strategy might be more feasible than total extermination anyway since eliminating mosquitos in unpopulated regions would probably be the most expensive part of such a project due to the lack of infrastructure in those areas.

Of course, once the mosquitos return, you still have to deal with those annoying bites....

What do you do when the virus infects reservoir species ? Or when there are infected people that aren't sick (and so, don't die or recover) ?

This article doesn't seem to know what the impact will be and doesn't seem to care.

Mosquitos are food for birds and bats. I think that talking to bird and bat biologists would be the best idea.

Came here to say this and surprised HN isn't outraged over this obvious oversight.

http://atlassociety.org/commentary/commentary-blog/3896-deat...

"What does it mean in practice to hold a philosophy that declares that pristine nature has intrinsic value in itself, and that regards Man and his activities as intrusive threats to the so-called ecological balance?

I have discussed the history, meaning, and basic premises of environmentalism previously, in my monograph The Green Machine and in my recorded talk "Green Cathedrals." I also explore these issues on my ecoNOT.com website.

But here I want to focus on the consequences of accepting core environmentalist premises—specifically, their deadly impact on human life."

Those who object to the eradication of mosquitoes are stating pretty clearly the value of human life according to their philosophy.

Interesting that this article shows up now, given that this one just poped up five days ago: http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/3284/what-if-we-era...

Do different species of mosquitoes interbreed? I'm guessing not, as this is the definition of "species".

If so, why do we care about the "ecological" impact of mosquito species that feed on humans? If anything, the ecosystem is unbalanced given the human population and the amount of mosquito food sources.

Most of the "whoops" tales are people that didn't listen to their scientists telling them not to, didn't have scientists at all, or were from long enough ago that we can discard their stories as irrelevant in the same way that we'd discard things like "spaceflight is impossible" and "nukes will end war". We've now traced the food chain around malaria mosquitoes out to three or four degrees of separation, including things like the diseases they carry. Their entire ecological niche is trivially replaced by close relatives that don't carry malaria. They're not even common enough to have major food-chain or crowding effects like you'd see with ants, rabbits, kudzu, or sparrows. Everything that we can find says that the damage from eradication would be zero. Not "small", or "manageable". None. They're small enough and unimportant enough that we should be thinking of them as disease organisms rather than insects. And I'm sure you're perfectly happy with the eradication of bot flies, polio, and smallpox. Reevaluate your beliefs.

Granted, we can never be certain about it. We're not deities, we're still limited by information theory and epistemology. But we're pretty damn sure. Way more than we need to be to go save half a million people a year.

Is MBTE really specific to only A. gambiae and A. funestus?

Something like 30 out of the 500 anopheles species are capable of carrying malaria. Of those, only those two matter, because the rest won't bite humans. Eradicating those two would be sufficient and another species (that doesn't bite humans) would take over. "Bites Humans" is furthermore not a strong enough competitive advantage to overcome any attempts to eradicate a successor that picks up the disease-ridden malarial torch.

Look at this problem from different angle. These two species are only abundant in areas where humans live. The malaria annual death toll is about 440000 lives. Maybe it is more worth of an effort to move humans out of there?

Since no one is going to eradicate cars worldwide just because the annual human death toll in car accidents is 1.25 million!

But the ongoing cost of eliminating cars would be enormous. The ancestor post is saying that there would be only fixed costs involved in eliminating malaria-transmitting species of mosquito.

What really ailes me is that all research is concentrated on killing poor mosquitoes, not the Plasmodium, which is the real cause of the disease. Should we also kill all the cats because they carry Toxoplasmae?

Given the that Toxoplasmae causes detrimental brain effects in humans, yes. Absolutely 100% unquestionably yes, without a doubt.

We could keep a few cats isolated behind glass in zoos. Isolated cats don't matter.

You understand! Lets apply for IMO grant for that.

If it's a matter of animal rights, cats have a hell of a lot more higher-order brain-functioning than mosquitoes do, because the latter have effectively zero.

Amusingly, anthropophilia versus zoophilia is genetic. If we all cleared out of Africa completely, those problematic mosquito strains may well go extinct. Now I'm wondering how fast they'd re-evolve. So it's probably more like the case I thought of at the end of my first post, where we'd have to stamp the property back out every time it evolved. It'd be pretty easy, though, and without a major animal reservoir it'd probably give us enough breathing room to eradicate the disease itself with ebola-style quarantines.

That's interesting; could another approach then be to use CRISPR to switch the anthropophilic species to zoophilic, and thus sidestep the "ecological destruction" argument that is the main objection to just destroying those species?

I think a cost-benefit analysis supports gene-drive-based mosquito eradication, but this option might be as effective and more politically palatable.

You'd be forcing them into another ecological niche, where without additional changes to adapt them to their new diet they'd likely be outcompeted and die. It'd be a complicated and inefficient route to eradicating them just as surely as if you'd killed them all.

Should we also help malaria reestablish in the areas we previously eradicated it? You know, Europe, the US.

This is technically possible. I wonder what political aim of such a campaign might be?

Let me know when you find a place that will accept and support 180MM Bangladeshis and 1B Africans.

Kill the mosquitos. It's cheaper in the long run.

Mongolia.

>It's cheaper in the long run.

Is it? A human that survives to reproduce that would have otherwise died from malaria uses more non-renewable resources than a human that dies from malaria over the course of their lifetime, and continues to do so after their death by way of their progeny.

In terms of how much time we have as a species before running out of non-renewables on earth, killing the mosquitos might cost more than our blue marble can afford.

Perhaps certain natural population controls ought not be tampered with.

The benefits of human population control through disease, isn't much of a benefit at all, as child mortality and fertility tends to be correlated. The less chance of your kids dying, the less kids you'll have, in general. This probably means that while we might see a population boom in an adjustment period, we'd probably soon see drops in fertility.

Layman here.

Even if the impact on the food chain is zero, does it mean that there won't be other impacts?

For example, on the eradication of mosquitoes, what if the disease that are currently only spread via mosquitoes mutate/evolve themselves to be airborne?

Evolution does not work that way. Parasites are generally happy to keep on reproducing until their host dies - there's no reason for them to stop, since the only reasoning that evolution understands is "there tends to be more things that reproduce better". Malaria reproduces better by going through human hosts and mosquito carriers than by going airborne. If going airborne helped an individual generation of malaria, malaria would already be airborne.

> what if the disease that are currently only spread via mosquitoes mutate/evolve themselves to be airborne?

Evolution doesn't have an intent. Diseases can't "evolve themselves." Evolution happens through random mutations* and selection of the fittest. If a mutation makes a virus or bacteria or protozoan more likely to survive, then the descendants of the mutant tend to multiply more and become more common. If the mutation makes the organism less likely to survive, descendants of the mutant tend to die out over time. (In other words, no matter how hard you hope your offspring will be born with four arms, they never will be.)

If anything, eliminating mosquitoes will make us SAFER from airborne zika or malaria. Why? Right now, there are tens of millions of infected mosquitoes out there right now. If airborne malaria is possible, there are tens of millions of chances for it to occur every day. And that would be such a powerful disease that it wouldn't matter that there also exists bloodborne malaria. If we eliminate tens of millions of malaria hosts, we reduce the number of chances for malaria to mutate into an airborne form.

As it happens, I don't think airborne malaria is likely -- the life cycle of malaria is way too complex and depends too much on stages that are specific to mosquitoes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malaria But the idea is the same.

* And a few other processes, such as DNA exchange, but the effect is the same for this purpose.

>Evolution doesn't have an intent. Diseases can't "evolve themselves."

I know. But when you remove mosquitoes from the picture, aren't you putting selection pressure on the diseases to be airborne?

>Evolution happens through random mutations* and selection of the fittest...

Yes. Say a virus of a disease x that normally spreads via mosquitos, gain a mutation to be airborne. But since there are an abundance of mosquitoes, an airborne strain does not have an advantage over mosquitoes borne strain. So it dies off (because of competition)

But when you eradicate the mosquitoes, or reduce their number significantly, suddenly the airborne strain has a tremendous advantage over the mosquito borne strain. Hence it can grow in numbers and eventually completely replace the mosquito borne strain...

Isn't this even remotely possible?

> aren't you putting selection pressure on the diseases to be airborne?

> an airborne strain does not have an advantage over mosquitoes borne strain

There are hundreds of millions of people today who don't currently have malaria, but would be at risk to get malaria if it went airborne. Airborne malaria wouldn't be competing with mosquitoborne malaria. It'd be competing with running out of people to kill.

There seems to be a startup lesson here: your competition isn't legacy players. It's non-consumption.

Sorry. I have no idea what you are talking about.

Are you a biologist/ecologist or someone knowledgeable in the field?

Instead of asking for credentials, just think a little harder. If "airborne malaria" could possibly be a thing, it would already be a thing. Plasmodium isn't a work crew responsible for killing a given number of people every year, after which they relax for a bit, only getting really creative when they fall behind their quota. It is a reproducing species that will reproduce and thrive as much as possible. There is no intelligence guiding mutation. If flying were an option, Plasmodium would be flying.

Your question is like asking, "if we rounded up all the lions in Africa and put them in pens, would they evolve wings to escape?" Yes it's that silly.

Sorry. I have to ask this to you also. Are you a biologists/ecologists or some one knowledgable in the field?

I can tell you both the parent and grandparent posters are knowledgeable enough to help answer your question. I think you're misunderstanding how evolution and selection pressure work at a conceptual level, and you don't need an evolutionary biologist to give expert input on it any more than you need an astronomer to explain why the moon has phases.

Let me take one more crack at this: think of natural selection as evaluating `if` statements: "if this organism has the ability to spread through the air, then it is more likely to survive an reproduce". That means mutations enabling that are going to propagate. Doesn't make any mutation more or less likely; it's just a question of whether it survives and reproduces or not. Importantly, it does not say "if this is a big improvement over the status quo, keep it". The forces at play here don't know what "improvement" means and they don't know what the status quo is (though see below about competition).

The point the parent and GP were making is that the advantage in being airborne exists whether or not malaria is being killed off. Right now, before any mosquito-killing-off initiatives, a plasmodium would do very well for itself and its offspring by escaping the confines of a mosquito and infecting zillions of people through the air. Its chances of reproduction in that scenario are presumably high, because there are so many people to infect. It doesn't become more likely to make that mutation and survive the results if its vector is being killed off. It doesn't know it's being killed off.

So how does selection pressure fit in? Imagine a beetle. If you change something about its environment, say, by introducing a new predator, then traits which previously provided the beetle no advantage (say, tasting bad to that predator) suddenly provide that advantage. Then the `if` statements are decidedly different now! It's not that the tasting-bad mutation is more likely to happen, it's just more likely to impact survival. So you expect more of that mutation to survive, and soon you get a whole ton of beetles that taste terrible to our new predator. But note how this doesn't help malaria go airborne because there's no "suddenly provide an advantage" part. It was always an advantage. That it might now impact whether the species survives or isn't part of the `if` statement.

One possible way in which this can be confusing is what the GP was specifically addressing: often the value of a mutation is a function of how it affects the organism's ability to compete with the rest of the species. If there's only so much food around, then being slightly better or worse at eating it affects an organism's survival because it needs to be better at eating than its brethren or it will starve. So in that case the current state of affairs gets baked into the `if` statement. The thing to note is that this logic doesn't apply to malaria going airborne; there isn't a competition over humans to infect.

Thanks for the explanation.

But you haven't said anything that I don't know already.

>The point the parent and GP were making is that the advantage in being airborne exists whether or not mosquitoes is being killed off.

When there is an abundance of mosquitoes, an airborne strain does not have a sufficient advantage over the mosquito borne strain.

Now this is an assumption I am making. And this is where you people are hung on.

You are saying that an air borne strain has an advantage even now. But what if an air borne strain is limited by distances it can travel before it dies of for want of a host? A mosquito borne strain can travel arbitrary distance and spread over a vast area..

So when there are mosquitoes, it is more or less an even match.

When you take mosquitoes out, suddenly the airborne strain gains a huge advantage over the mosquito borne strain. Right? Because there are less number of mosquitoes, the spread of mosquito borne strain is reduced. This gives the air borne strain more chance to propagate to the next generation.

If you are thinking, how does it give more probability for the air borne strain to spread? Please consider this scenario.

Let there be two indviduals A and B, A infected with an Airborne strain and B infected with a mosquito borne strain. Let there be a healthy indvidual C that is, say, 10 meters away from A and B.

Case 1: Current situtation, with an abundance of mosquitoes.

A mosquito bites B, taking in the virus and takes off. At the same time, a virus of airborne strain start from A. Now, the mosquito proceeds to bite C right away. Now the virus enters C's body. After a while, C's immune system starts a response to fight this off. A day passes. C's immune system is still fighting the infection.

It is at this time at which the air borne strain enters C's body. But there is a fight going on in there with C's immune system in full alert and is killing of off the likes of this viruses. The small amount of air borne virus that manage to enter C's body gets slaughtered before it gets a chance to grow there. C might or might not get infected with mosquito borne strain...

But The airborne strain does not propagate to the next generation.

Case 2: Mosquitoes are being killed off.

Now there is a reduced number of mosquitoes. So when the airborne strain enters C's body, the mosquito borne strain is still not there yet. Immune system has not yet started fighting viruses of this type. So it gets a head start, and ends up successfully infecting C.

The airborne strain propagate to the next generation.

> If you are thinking, how does it give more probability for the air borne strain to spread?

Right, that's the important thing to think about: the size of the advantage over (or even disadvantage to) the status quo doesn't matter in itself; it only matters to the degree that competition affects the viability of the new strain. I'm glad we're on the same page about that, because that's the thing I perceived that you did not understand.

On your answer to that question, if you go up to the GGP post (your first responder, Slapshot), you'll see that's exactly what they were arguing against. Most people don't have a malaria at any given time, so they're not competing for hosts. So instead of considering how our two strains battle it out in C, the dominant question -- the one that determines whether the strain is viable -- is whether it can infect A's friends D through Z, all of whom don't have malaria, presumably because they weren't bitten by an infected mosquito in the last couple weeks. Since the answer to that doesn't depend on what's happening in C, we conclude that it has about the same probability now as when mosquitos are being eliminated.

I mean, that's the whole reason we're so scared of things "going airborne", right? That they spread so much faster and frictionlessly, and they're not constrained by the vagaries of their hosts.

Not crucial to this discussion, but worth knowing: malaria isn't a virus; it's a protozoa. It does mean the immune response is pretty different.

>is whether it can infect A's friends D through Z, all of whom don't have malaria, presumably because they weren't bitten by an infected mosquito in the last couple weeks...

The point is, with mosquitos, a larger percentage of population (A's friends) will already be bitten by infected mosquitos, making it harder for the airborne strain to find a fresh host...

Thanks for the info regarding Malaria..

(I'm a layperson, too, for the record.)

"I know. But when you remove mosquitoes from the picture, aren't you putting selection pressure on the diseases to be airborne?"

Not necessarily that specific pressure. Except in carefully controlled laboratory situations, we can't specify the selection pressure being applied. There are too many potential pressures at work, and the mutation outcomes are too stochastic. At best we can force pressure in general. The outcome of that pressure might be entirely different from what we expect it to be.

Let's say we eradicate mosquitos. What other vectors of transmission does a virus like Zika have? What other hosts? It's possible the virus finds a new insect-borne transmission pathway: say, ticks instead of mosquitos. It's possible the virus 'focuses' (to use the term very very loosely) on other hosts, and effectively ceases to be a human concern. I'd wager that either of these outcomes is the more likely adaptation case than a leap to airborne transmission.

Evolving an entirely new means of infectious transmission seems to be a much rarer adaptation than adapting through other means (increased infectious potential; severity of infection; adaptation to new host types; etc.). It's popular in TV and movies to speak about a virus "going airborne," but in actual record, that's usually not what happens. Evolution doesn't have any agency or self-direction; it usually arrives at the 'laziest' and least costly alternative in response to imposed pressures. In this scenario, evolving airborne survivability and transmissibility is probably more costly than adapting to whatever enzyme prevents fleas and ticks from being carriers.

Source: http://evolution.berkeley.edu/evolibrary/news/141003_ebola

So it seems that it is unlikely, but not entirely impossible.

Also, I am just putting forward a dangerous possibility other than the effect on the food chain..

There seems to be a mixup here between "pressure" as in "this organism is under pressure" (implying an unfavorable environment) and selection pressure, which acts on genes, not species, and is really more of a filter.

It's not as if an organism can "release" the "pressure" by evolving in a new direction. In your example, if we eradicate mosquitos, one transmission vector becoming less viable doesn't make other vectors more likely to arise, as if by some conservation of total population.

> least costly alternative in response to imposed pressures

Evolution is even lazier, alternatives don't arise in response to imposed pressures at all, so in this scenario the lazy thing is extinction.

> I know. But when you remove mosquitoes from the picture, aren't you putting selection pressure on the diseases to be airborne?

Organisms also need the opportunity to evolve; removing their only vector is analogous to trying to apply selective pressure to pigs to evolve to fly by throwing them off a cliff. Yes, any pig who could fly would survive and have a huge advantage over all the now-dead non-flying pigs. But it just ain't gonna happen.

That would be true if you are going to eradicate mosquitoes overnight...

Also, I am just putting forward one possibility other than the effect on the food chain...

>Most of the "whoops" tales are people that didn't listen to their scientists telling them not to, didn't have scientists at all, or were from long enough ago that we can discard their stories as irrelevant....

It fascinates and terrifies me that we humans constantly think we know what we're doing and won't mess up again, like somehow we're superior to our ancestors because we have a little more knowledge. "Oh yeah, they put lead in gasoline because they didn't know better. We know better, what we're doing now is perfect".

2050: "Oh yeah, they used to use nasty stuff in fracking compounds, but we know better now"

2060: "Oh yeah, everyone used to carry around little electromagnetic devices and put them next to their brain, but we know better now".

It's it clear that anything major we do now will be looked back on as a complete f-up, once the next generations have more knowledge.

We seem to think we know best, when in reality we have absolutely no idea what's going on. When will we learn to leave well enough alone?

> 2060: "Oh yeah, everyone used to carry around little electromagnetic devices and put them next to their brain, but we know better now".

This one is easy to debunk: look at the spectrum:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electromagnetic_spectrum

UV and everything in that direction: dangerous.

Infrared and everything in that direction: not dangerous.

The Sun emits on both sides, and we really know very good which side we have to protect us from.

You're missing the entire point.

You think it's safe by 2016 standards, in the same way we thought lead in gas, or agent orange was safe by the standards of those years.

In 50 years we'll know a lot more than we do now, and hindsight will be a magical thing.

By 2060 standards, we're downright uneducated. Think about how little we knew in the late 1960's, and the stupid stuff that was done based on "we know what we're doing"

We already know now much more than we apply. Global warming is the most obvious example. It's true, the hypothetical people in 50 years will consider the current and earlier generations barbarian in their approach to the use of the fossil fuels. But we actually even now know fantastically good the exact effects the electromagnetic waves, and that at least since 1905 work of Einstein for which he received Nobel prize. So there was a lot of time already to check if we got that wrong. Don't worry about a few watts your phone produces, worry about the Sun and anything that produces that kind of radiation (or worse, but in that direction), the one which is on the opposite side of the radio waves and visible light and the one for which we know exactly how damaging it is:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thymine_dimers

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultraviolet_index

Regarding lead poisoning, it was since forever known that lead is poisonous, the "safe level" was something that was better established in last 50 years and enforced by better policies. There's no parallel for infrared and radio waves (that is, lower frequencies and energies of photons) but there is for UV or gamma rays (that is, higher frequencies and energies of photons).

Part of the problem with this idea is that your cell phone exposes your brain to trivial quantities of EM radiation in both absolute and relative terms. If EM in that spectrum had any kind of effect, we'd have seen it long since in people that live near radio masts, people that work with radar units and radio transmitters (military, mostly), people that sleep next to their wifi modems, people working in electrical generator rooms and physics labs, and people with old microwave ovens. Ever had a house where the WiFi would cut out when someone nuked a pizza? Standing near that is way worse than your cell phone. You can't even claim long-term effects, because we've been working with radios and microwaves of this strength in these frequencies for 70+ years. There's nothing there. Please stop with the fear mongering, or at least pick something more likely to be a problem. Maybe the effect of switching from memorization to Google assisted indexization, or long-term psychological effects of social networks in relation to Dunbar's number, or sugar substitutes and gut flora. All of those are reasonable "whoops" sites. Cell phones giving you cancer isn't a potential whoops.

Again, you miss the point.

The certainty with which you make these statements is the exact same certainty that scientists 50 or 100 years ago used to justify doing all kinds of shit we now know caused unforeseen harm.

Don't focus on the one example I gave, focus on that fact that we continually mess with stuff we don't understand, with consequences we can't comprehend. Then 50 years later we just say "we know better now" and proceed to mess it all up in different ways. Repeat.

Maybe in 2060 we'll discover that NOT radiating our brains was killing us. You can't just arbitrarily guess which things are dangerous -- you have to raise legitimate scientific questions.

It's amazing we're not all dead yet, isn't it? messing with everything like we have, vastly extending expected lifespan and years of health...

> It's amazing we're not all dead yet, isn't it?

Tens of thousands of living things that used to call this planet home are extinct thanks to our meddling. I'd say that's proof enough we're badly f'ing things up.

> Tens of thousands ... are extinct thanks to our meddling.

Probably much more:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_extinction

"the present rate of extinction may be up to 140,000 species per year,[2] making it the greatest loss of biodiversity since the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event."

I agree with you.

But you will provoke people by saying things like this. I have been heavily down voted else in this thread for saying something like this

I guess it is because people have great difficulty in looking from outside their current time frame. For example, people always thing that they are living in "modern times".

We were living in modern times in the 50's, 60's, 70's, 80's, just like we are living in modern times now. People find it hard to comprehend that their times will once be old, and their beliefs and assumptions about the world obsolete, and their scientists proved wrong. It just does not occur to them.

This might be giving some kind of false belief that we know nearly all there is to know, which lead to fallacies like the parent comment. He implies we know all there is to know about the exposure to radiation.

A quote from Mark twain comes to mind.

"It ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble. It's what you know for sure that just ain't so"

Human beings should learn to be modest. How small we are, and how little we know. Then may be we will proceed with more caution and be less reckless with imposing our will upon the other living things on this planet...

The problem with your "point" isn't the point itself, it's that you demonstrate illiteracy in the science of the last 100 years or more while making your point. There were always the limits of what we know, but we also got better in knowing where the limits are, and they aren't in the infrared and radio area effects.

We (as humanity) do "mess with the stuff" and we (as in scientists) even know exactly where and how much we (as in "political and economic forces") do that. The amount of fossil fuels use is one good example. And having huge nuclear stockpiles ready for launch is another. And we "know better" (as in knowing that the effects won't be desirable for "us") even now, but look how many forces pretend we don't.

Having basic scientific literacy actually matters, otherwise you'll fall worrying for pure distractions, like "you should worry that mobile phones emit radio waves to your brain." No, either forget it, that's pure distraction, or at least, learn a little of physics, you'll benefit from that.

And we don't have to wait 50 years. We already know the exact problems that will be much bigger in 50 years if we don't act.

So what do you want to do instead? Do you intend to only do things that we know are safe? If so, how do you intend to prove anything to be absolutely safe? Or, if not, do you intend to do things that we're "pretty sure" are safe, or things that seem to be the least dangerous? Because, the way you're thinking, absolutely anything could have catastrophic results, and you don't give us any useful way to differentiate between stuff we should be doing and stuff we shouldn't be doing.

Of course, I doubt that any of that went through your head. You just pointed at something that caught your attention, completely failing to consider all of the other things that are likely similarly dangerous like aluminum cans, pickled vegetables, soap, clothing, light bulbs, the English language, and so on and so forth. All of those are just as potentially dangerous as cell phones.

I think that you would be well served by studying epistemology, philosophy of science, and rational utilitarianism. I believe that you will find some ideas that will be useful to to you in the future.

"Granted, we can never be certain about it. We're not deities, we're still limited by information theory and epistemology. But we're pretty damn sure. Way more than we need to be to go save half a million people a year."

(I support eradicating mosquitos)

What is missing from this discussion, however, is the agent of malaria itself. We keep discussing this in terms of the mosquito, as if it is the mosquito that is the agent of malaria - but remember, it's just a carrier - malaria is using the mosquito to further its own ends.

The reservations I think we should have are not about the food chain or about predators/prey, etc. - it is that the sudden pressure we put on malaria itself forces it to adapt to a transmission host/vector other than mosquitos. Perhaps something more difficult to deal with.

We're pushing something dangerous into a corner, bottling it up under high pressure ... we should be worried about where it leaks out to.

Malaria is not a sentient organism that feels cornered and will lash out because of that. The chance that it will mutate to an other infection mechanism is directly related with the number of specimens in circulation. Killing off it's carrier will reduce it.

> Their entire ecological niche is trivially replaced by close relatives that don't carry malaria

We can not be sure about this; evolution is fast in arthropods. And they will bring their own diseases with them.

Mosquitoes are anything but unimportant or uncommon for the ecosystem.

I'm the only one not comfortable with the idea of wiping whole species just because we don't like them? I mean, I'm far fromthe Gaia thing, but what rights do we have to do that? And next? Rats, cockroaches? Hey, this specie of birds doesn't do anything useful and eat our fruits, why not killing them all?

Mosquitoes aren't even "responsible" for those diseases... Maybe we should invest in proactive body defenses against virus instead of just killing some random things.

Even if we just kill those mosquitoes species you know what? Nature evolves. Other mosquitoes and viruses will come. Do we kill them too?

>just because we don't like them?

It's bit stronger than "we don't like them"

>Maybe we should invest in proactive body defenses against virus instead of just killing some random things.

Invest more than the billions that billions that Bill Gates has already invested?

And do you think Bill Gates would approve killing whole species ?

I honestly don't known but he seems to be a very clever guy and eradicating species doesn't sound to be a clever solution and really not a good long term solution.

What if you break a whole ecosystem ? What if those mosquitoes contain invaluable genes for future medicine? What if they offer a unique window on the evolution of insects?

But hey, who care? Kill them all..

The Gates foundation funds efforts to eradicate polio and malaria.

He's written about it:

https://www.gatesnotes.com/Health/Eradicating-Malaria-in-a-G...

>And do you think Bill Gates would approve killing whole species ?

Yes, and in fact he's done the research, written about it and ultimately it may have been his investments that led to this conclusion.

Or we can just let hundreds of thousands continue to die because they might magically contain the cure to cancer in the future.

> Instead of just killing random things

There's nothing random about it, they're the transmitters.

Should we also be against antibiotics? It's just random bacteria.

> Nature evolves. Other mosquitoes and viruses will come

Guess we should have left polio to it's own ends. And all vaccines are disrupting the natural order of things. Best not worry about any of it because there will always be another disease

Humans do not like seeing their family and friends die. The motivational force to prevent that from happening is very strong. Ultimately, that's why we're killing the mosquitos.

This author clearly twists the words from that 2010 Nature report[1], as

1) That quote "Life would continue as before — or even better." is not even the conclusion in the Nature report. It's in the fifth paragraph of the first part out of the three part report. I guess this author just stopped here and failed to read the rest parts of the report for his conclusion?

2) The other two parts of the reports talk about the mosquito biomass and its impact to arctic tundra ecosystem, food chains and even cacao pollination.

3) The original author Janet Fang actually concluded the report by quoting entomologist Joe Conlon "If we eradicated them tomorrow, the ecosystems where they are active will hiccup and then get on with life." And the more important part is the next sentence: "Something better or worse would take over."

The key is that there is a high probability something worse would take over when you tried to mess Nature's arrangement in the past 100 million years abruptly. As noted by other HN user, Chairman Mao also thought getting rid of sparrows was really a good idea.

[1] http://www.nature.com/news/2010/100721/full/466432a.html

My friends in Ft. Lauderdale got a couple of CO2 "puffer" traps[1] and it really cut down the mosquito population and it was "chemical free". (caveat adding CO2 to the air I suppose) I was really impressed at how well they worked, my friend calls them the "fake cows". In the Bay Area I've never really had enough mosquito angst to try to build one. The basic idea is to lure them into range and then using a fan blow them into a bucket of sugar water. Something you could easily implement with an Arduino. That said, killing them with lasers[2] is pretty cool too.

[1] These are some examples, I am not endorsing these guys just found them for folks who were wondering what I was talking about -- https://www.megacatch.com/

[2] http://www.intellectualventures.com/inventions-patents/our-i... -- if only someone other than Intellectual Ventures had built it ...

Why do people think it's a good idea to kill off an insect that's a food source to thousands of other insects and animals?

Truth. Most of the comments here made me realize that a significant amount of HN readers are less intelligent than I thought.

Yeah, as long as it's poor black people and South Americans who cares? </sarcasm>

Save a hand full of people while potentially dooming billions? I might not be getting your sarcasm but I'm totally okay with the current situation when the other presents the possibility of destroying millions of ecosystems which mind you would effect billions to trillions of animals, insects, and even people across the globe who are dependent on these functioning ecosystems. Killing off the primary source of food for a few insects/animals can have cataclysmic effect.

In addition Mosquitoes do serve a purpose outside of being food. They introduce many diseases, much of which we developed immunities to and continue to successfully ward off naturally to this day. They are the worlds natural vaccination shot so to speak.

Truthfully the idea of killing off all mosquitoes seems so damn absurd I don't understand why anyone thinks it's a good idea.

While potentially dooming billions - is anyone seriously suggesting that? Especially if you can target only a handful of the 3500 species.

> They introduce many diseases, much of which we developed immunities to and continue to successfully ward off naturally to this day

What diseases are you referring to here?

There are ~200 million cases of malaria a year and about ~500k of those are fatal. It's a debilitating disease and if it happens to the breadwinners it can ruin the entire family. Hardly a "handful" of people

We're dumb because we know how to RFTA?

> There’s little evidence, though, that mosquitoes form a crucial link in any food chain, or that their niche could not be filled by something else. When science journalist Janet Fang spun out this thought experiment for Nature in 2010, she concluded that “life would continue as before—or even better.” I arrived at the same answer when I looked into the same question for a piece published three years later. “There’s no food chain that we know of where mosquitoes are an inevitable link in a crucial process,” one mosquito-control expert told me.

Or because we like reading other sources? http://www.nature.com/news/2010/100721/full/466432a.html

How ironic.

Looks like someone wants to unleash the CRISPR gods...

- http://www.cell.com/cell-reports/abstract/S2211-1247(15)0026...

- http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/malaria-zika-crispr-gene-editing-co...

- http://phys.org/news/2016-02-crispr-female-mosquitos.html

- http://www.nature.com/news/gene-drive-mosquitoes-engineered-...

Here's a thought. If the people who developed these things spent their own money to release them worldwide (yep, not just one continent) because they believe in the safety and importance of it... What would happen to them? And what would happen if they are right and it works great? Would the public really allow them to be punished? Would someone not reimburse them? They claim it's safe and are willing to risk the world, but not willing to risk their own livelyhood and reputation apparently.

If you believe in such a cause, and honestly believe the downside was zero, and you have the tool to do the job... What is holding you back? That's an honest question and I'd love to hear their responses.

This reminds me of GEM Mosquito control. I believe this is the only real eco friendly solution for mosquitoes menace. But corporates milking money out of mosquitoes control devices, won't let this be mainstream.

> GEM technology is a process of achieving sustainable mosquito control in an eco friendly manner by providing artificial breeding grounds utilizing common household utensils and destroying larvae by non-hazardous natural means such as throwing them in dry places or feeding them to larvae eating fishes.

Process in short - http://www.appropedia.org/GEM_mosquito_control#Modus_operand....

Wouldn't mosquito predators effectively die off as well? Birds, larger bugs, bats, etc.

Not all mosquitoes bite hoomans.

Not necessarily, Mosquito's are not primary prey for any species and the niche they occupy would likely be filled rapidly by similar species that don't tend to spread horrific diseases.

This is addressed in both the article and the video.

Most mosquitoes don't bite humans; we will leave those alone. Birds can eat those all they like.

Do we really know biological systems well enough to globalize code that nukes all X chromosomes in sperm? Maybe there are unknown mechanisms for cross-species sequence transfer. That could end up being quite the Darwin award ;)

If there is simultaneously released artificial retrovirus, carried with Plasmodium, that will transfer gene to human blood from now sterile mosquito, than we are doomed. And from what I know about the US and current state of pharma research, that is entirely technically possible and application only depends from a certain political will.

Discl. a good friend of mine developed biological weapons in late 80-ies. In 40 years there has been significant progress in the field.

Sure.

But then, anyone who'd do that could just include the code in the retrovirus ;)

There's a trope in dystopian SF (and maybe first, in Burroughs' Cities of the Red Night) about specifically targeting particular races.

Reality is always way stranger than fiction.

There are other way to control the diseases. There's even a startup called AIME (http://www.aime.life) that focuses on using machine learning to predict the next mosquito borne disease outbreak. They claim to have pretty good accuracy too. The truth is though, that as the diseases mainly originate in "developing countries", no one seems care enough to even financially support them (not even YC). Still, they've made a lot of progress in the past months, even supporting the state of Sao Paulo in Brazil.

Whatever happened to those mosquito laser zappers? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BKm8FolQ7jw

According to an acquaintance who worked there, the original research was funded by the Gates Foundation’s anti-malaria R&D program. Intellectual Ventures developed the prototype Photonic Fence (http://www.intellectualventures.com/inventions-patents/our-i...) but concluded that low-tech things like bed nets had higher benefit per dollar for malaria prevention, particularly when you factor in the challenge of powering the device in areas without reliable electricity (the kill laser requires enough power to make solar non-trivial).

The good news is that they licensed it to a company for commercialization last year:

http://www.intellectualventureslab.com/invent/new-collaborat...

The business plan I'd like to see would be selling it as a luxury for the relatively affluent and use that sales volume to drive the manufacturing costs down. I live in Washington DC and it'd have to be really expensive compared to the cost of real-estate which is unpleasant to use from May to November due to mosquitoes, not to mention the growing number of people who will pay a premium not to spray pesticides around their children and pets. Diseases like Zika, Dengue, etc. should boost that even higher.

Definitely agree with the idea that it should be sold in the first world to get economies of scale. How much would these things cost, like 300$ a pop?

According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mosquito_laser it would cost $50. They deliberately built it using already available parts (the laser is the same as used for bluray for example) to keep cost down. The problem seems to be (as parent pointed out) reliable electricity.

If I'm remembering the conversation correctly, the most expensive component was the kill laser (it uses a lower-power laser to track flying things & match the mosquito size / wing frequency and then fired up one strong enough to fry an insect) but that hopefully has been going down since those figures were calculated years ago.

The only comments I see here seem to be taking the the article literally, but I have a strong suspicion that it's largely a parody of the Trump/Cruz talk talk on the Middle East, ISIS, and Islam.

> The ugly situation on the ground does not call for Integrated Mosquito Management; it demands a program of Total Mosquito Destruction.

and

> we’re left to wait and watch swarms of evil on the wing, mating in midair, and landing on our shores. An enemy has made its way to the nation’s borders. Now is not the time for soft responses.

(and more)

Can we do this systematic?

First massive reduction, to test wether the Eco-System can handle it short term.

If yes, eradication until the diseases have vannished.

Measurement if the ecosystem handles it. Reintroduction if needed.

From the article: But New Yorkers, like everyone else in the United States, can take solace in two simple facts. The first is that Zika virus can’t easily be transmitted from one person to another

"Zika virus can be spread during sex by a man infected with Zika to his partners."

http://www.cdc.gov/zika/transmission/sexual-transmission.htm...

Is there any website/service that allows US citizens to sign and send a pre-written letter to their congressman to address this issue, specifically pertaining to the Zika Virus and/or killing mosquitoes? Change.org campaign?

My wife is pregnant now, we live in Southern California, and I feel fairly powerless to do anything except ask my wife to DEET up, be on the lookout for freestanding water, add screens, and pray.

DEET has its own health risks.

Not strictly on topic, but the discussion of screwfly eradication made me think of [this brilliant and chilling short story][0].

[0]: https://lexal.net/scifi/scifiction/classics/classics_archive...

Next up is the "kissing bug" http://pvangels.com/news-mexico/176714/us-and-mexico-must-jo...

Possibly responsible for most heart failures in people under the age of 50.

Aside from the question of whether we should kill all mosquitoes, I question if we can. Is there really a pesticide that we can apply globally that kills all mosquitoes, but not huge swaths of other types of insects? And what is the cost of this--who is paying for this global campaign?

I realize this is blasphemy to some, but perhaps it's time to consider further use of DDT.

This is indeed blasphemy. I worked close with people who replaced Soviet DDT programme for controlling gypsy moth populations with effective biological treatment programme in 70-ies (viral agents species-specific). Cheaper, easier to apply, no side effects, real cute. Took 15 years to develop.

DDT and the like are too chemically stable.

I've heard environmentalists say that one advantage of mosquitoes is that it keeps humans out of tropical forests. It's a view of humans as the pest. Which isn't that preposterous when you consider the vast ecological damage we're doing as a species.

Ah, the scapegoat for the much harder problem: "Let's get rid of bad government."

let's give mixomatose to all rabbits to try to eradicate them all.... Well, long story short, Australia is still full of rabbits and this disease has been introduced in Europe by an idiot and it is still harming the ecosystem. Adaptation sux.

http://www.bbc.com/autos/story/20160422-battling-the-zika-vi...

The writer thinks in terms of human loves, excluding the fact that birds and other species thrive on mosquitoes. If you remove one step of the foodchain, you will hurt everyone, including us.

Evolution requires the human population to go through epidemics in order to get stronger. Unfortunately what is best for the planet and species is not always the best for individual humans.

Don't fall into the trap of anthropomorphizing evolution. It doesn't "require" anything, it certainly isn't sending epidemics to help us "get stronger", and it really doesn't "care" whether anything lives or dies.

People thought the bubonic plague and cholera were God's will up until the germ theory of disease was discovered, happy to pray and cast spells while wallowing in their own feces in flea-bitten squalor, and that's not much different (or much more rational) than arguing that epidemics should be accepted because they're "evolution's will." Believing that nature has a plan only causes unnecessary suffering. Nature no more has a plan than does the dust in a dust storm.

"Evolution's reaction" to malaria was to give people sickle cell anemia.

Evolution doesn't care for happiness, strength, health or anything like that.

It only optimizes the number of copies of genes in given circumstances.

I'm getting attacked here at home. Tell me one of you has a mosquito destroying IOT startup going on. Something that maybe counts the kills and pushes stats to the cloud?

"This is genocide: the deliberate and systematic destruction of all life on Arrakis!"

Yeah ok, just mosquitoes, but it made me think of the angry emperor.

Just wanted to say this is a fucking stupid idea.

It's an amusing article, almost sounded like we are not the most destructive species to most other species on the planet.

"The End of the Whole Mess" by Stephen King is a good read illustrating the problem with this approach.

Maybe all the pesticides used to control mosquitos have created the virus in the first place.

We need to eliminate/inject mosquitoes with a virus that is not harmful to humans

Perhaps mosquitos are here to manage the human population in the ecosystem.

Okay. Then lets let some disease carrying mosquitoes into all countries - including Western Europe and the US. We wouldnt want those ecosystems to be imbalanced.

>>lets let some disease carrying mosquitoes into all countries

Why bother when you can count on tourism to do it for you?

http://www.cdc.gov/zika/geo/united-states.html

Looked at your comment history and its clear you are either a xenophobe, or clueless.

Firstly, the cure should not be worse than the disease.

I wonder what PETA would have to say about this.

Intrexon (NYSE:XON) bought Oxitec last year.

First: genocide liches

Corporate trolling

What if mosquitoes are the only thing preventing an alien invasion? Or even worse, the key to stopping one when it happens.

"Tabarnak! we would have won if we had some damn mosquitoes!"

Tabernac? Never thought I would see a french canadian curse here.

AFAIR (cannot find sources) they are crucial for the soil formation (at least for tansfering the nutrients from the swampy areas), there've been some old Soviet studies.

> We’re told that scientists must work hard to find a new vaccine, as if that would be the best solution to the problem.

Because it's probably easier than just preventing mosquitos.

The advantage we have with mosquitoes is that they fly about and mingle with the general population, looking for other mosquitoes to mate with. Isolated population reservoirs are relatively easy to identify. So if the latest advances in DNA technology bear fruit, mosquitoes may well turn out to be the easier target.

Also, I hate mosquitoes and want them all dead.

My condo is clear. Next.

How many bugs and spiders rely on mosquitoes as part of their diet? Out of all of the ideas in this article, not once was the impact to the biological food chain discussed. We can kill all of the little annoying things, but how many beneficial organisms are being supported by them?

You must have stopped reading part way through:

There will always be experts (and journalists) who can't think of the impact of some change. But I believe tropic cascades are a real thing in food webs, and we can't really know for sure that something will have no impact until we do the thing. If there is one thing we're learning right now, it's that these cascades are real and quite dangerous. Now that this is known, no one should in good conscience set off a possible cascade without knowing something about what might happen.

Humans can improve on nature once they understand the impact of an action well, so I'd get behind a well funded study into what effect getting rid of mosquitoes would have — one with an experimental basis and not just a journalist's thought experiments.

That line from Fang continues to be quoted, but I never found the justification in her own article. It's been a bit since I read it, but I recall that she spent the entire article relating the various ways the absence of mosquitoes would damage ecology, and then concluding nothing would change.

> not once was the impact to the biological food chain discussed.

The end of the article is specifically about this very point, and the uncertainties around it.

Also, Mosquito larvae grow in water and are a source of food for aquatic wildlife.

I seriously doubt that we understand every aquatic ecosystem well enough to know if eliminating mosquitos entirely would be harmful in the long run. And once we eliminate them, there's no going back.

No one is talking about eliminating all mosquitos (despite the headline).

There are over 3,000 species of mosquito. If there weren't any Aedes or Anopheles larvae in the water, other species would expand to fill the empty niche.

Unfortunately, I am a part of mosquitoes' diet, and will gladly want them to go finally and never return.

They make a great great deal of nice countryside not enjoyable. Even if they don't carry malaria or zika here, am I bound to suffer?

watch the will smith movie "I am Legend" where he's the last human alive because scientists made a bold decision like this, then decide if we should do a pre-emptive strike. Or will this be the 12 monkeys (wow, 2nd movie reference) tipping point.

You know that's not a documentary right?

There are plenty of sci-fi stories where scientists meddle with forces beyond their understanding and get burned. That's not evidence of anything except the fact that people enjoy those sorts of stories.

great point and cartoon. Am I being like a caveman not wanting to mess with nature? I guess so.

Others have mentioned that this isn't really relevant, but I'm just going to recommend at least reading the novella, and avoiding the movie.

Why don't we kill off some of the humans instead? It's sad when a child dies of malaria, but anymore I'm wondering just what makes us think we deserve to be here more than any other animal, insect, etc? Epidemics are tools of nature to deal with an unbalanced ecology.

People are far more destructive to the environment and have been around for far less longer than the mosquito, which has been here since the beginning.

At least something like a mosquito is honest about its intentions. It wants to have a handy blood meal from you. A human, on the other hand, will engage in varying forms of deceit, deception and then probably fuck your mother behind your back, before they sucks you dry.

Which one would you rather have around? Something to think on next time your get bit by one.

Serious question: In areas where Malaria is killing many people, access to health care is a big part of why, right? So I'm assuming if you just removed the mosquitos, those people that died would be alive, and putting greater strain on already famine-like food economies. Wouldn't that be equally as bad?

All the people chronically sickened by malaria (but not killed) could be more productive. Probably the strain from chronic malaria is worse for an economy than any theoretical strain due to feeding a few million more people.

>>Probably the strain from chronic malaria is worse for an economy than any theoretical strain due to feeding a few million more people.

How about the strain on the planet's non-renewable resources? One would think that the million more people would cause said resources to run out sooner than they otherwise would.

Perhaps we should focus on how to deal with the consequences of eliminating certain natural human population controls before we go through with it.

http://www.gatesfoundation.org/Who-We-Are/Resources-and-Medi...

See the third section in that link.

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