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Comment by llamaimperative | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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 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.

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.

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