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Comment by WheelsAtLarge | Hacker News Reader

Findings like this is why I find it very unpleasant when people start talking about destroying whole species because they are pests to humans.

The latest one I've read about is the idea that we need to get rid of all mosquitos. They are pests to us but I wonder how many other species depend on them for food and how will the mosquito's extermination affect the web of life.

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The particular species of mosquito that carries disease and bites humans is just 3% of ~3,500 different species of mosquitos.

So in the case of mosquitoes we absolutely do not want to eradicate all mosquitoes, just a very specific sub-population, which by the way, are the most deadly animal to humans in the world. Malaria is likely responsible for killing a single digit and possibly double digit percentage of all humans that have ever lived. Mosquitoes have literally killed billions of people since the dawn of time.

[1] - https://www.gatesnotes.com/Health/Most-Lethal-Animal-Mosquit...

[2] - http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-35408835

The reality is humans have caused another mass extinction event for the planet.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/11/climate/mass-extinction-a...

So that's the reality of the situation. If we are wiping out species, might as well do one like mosquitoes which are a nuisance, bring disease and do not have some kind of monopoly in their biological niche. Anything that eats mosquitoes also eats other bugs.

Apparently we're not even close to '6th mass extinction' standards:

https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/06/the-ends...

“I think that if we keep things up long enough, we’ll get to a mass extinction, but we’re not in a mass extinction yet, and I think that’s an optimistic discovery because that means we actually have time to avoid Armageddon,”

We know what happens: evolution. The idea that the whole thing will totally collapse because you made one change is ridiculous and frankly utterly unsupported by the evidence, not least our understanding of this poor optimization algorithm driven by random chance.

I frankly always find these comments unpleasant because they seem to come exclusively from people sitting in some air-conditioned building miles away from a full 5 m^2 trees that they got to riding a 2 ton behemoth on tarmaced streets that casually reaches speeds no animal ever could powered by the remains of dinosaurs. Yeah I wonder how that affected "the web of life". It's a fashionable form of NIMBY except these people are not arguing from a position of naked self-interest but ignorance.

It's just as silly to assume that everything will be fine if we lose one species as it is to assume that everything will collapse. These questions need to be asked and studied, not just dismissed with a sneer either way.

Petroleum does not come from the remains of dinosaurs, but rather algae and zooplankton. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petroleum

Sure, the nature will adapt, but will humans? For us, it's not a zero sum game of universe-wide optimization. We have skin in the game, so to speak.

Mandatory George Carlin link: "The planet is fine; humans are fucked" https://youtu.be/YawTvnyoqbU?t=77

Well said. I've heard this before,"Destruction by many cuts will eventually kill us." I think you can apply this to the way we treat our environment.

It can take a long time to balance back out. Something will develop to fill the empty niche. Things will be fine in the end for nature. But it might take 10,000 years for things to stabilize again, and I don't want to wait that long :)

Evolution works for natural slow changes over thousands of years and not against sudden disruptions. There had been multiple ELEs.

But won't you please think of the mosquitoes!

Mosquito elimination is considered for metropolitan areas where it'd have an insignificant environmental impact rather than as a global extinction.

The topic of global eradication of mosquitoes (and the implication of that) is extraordinarily common. The frequent argument is no species is known to subsist entirely on mosquitoes, implying it may have no or negligible implication on the ecosystem at large.

This was discussed on HN recently, in a pretty nice manner actually: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14772926

You do not need to go that drastic. One could consider significant reduction in numbers, even staying narrow to a small set of subspecies (e.g. deer ticks which are much more numerous this year), instead of full extermination.

This happens in nature, too. Predators and prey numbers can take big swings with no humans to blame.

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