Comment by saulrh | Hacker News Reader

Comment by saulrh | Hacker News Reader

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Something like 30 out of the 500 anopheles species are capable of carrying malaria. Only 2 of those 30 bite humans: A. gambiae and A. funestus. Eradicating those two would be sufficient and another species, one that doesn't bite humans, would take over the rest of their niche. "Bites humans" is not a sufficiently beneficial adaptation to be a game-changer. We can eliminate that trait and precisely that trait with surprisingly little selective pressure.

Most of the "whoops" tales we hear 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 their competitors, the diseases they carry, and the things they spread those diseases to. Their entire ecological niche is trivially replaced by close relatives that don't carry malaria to humans. 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 eradicating these two species would be zero. Not "small", not "manageable". None.

Malaria-carrying human-biting mosquitoes are small enough and unimportant enough that we should be thinking of them as disease organisms rather than insects. I'm sure you're perfectly happy with the eradication of bot flies, polio, and smallpox; why not A. gambiae and A. funestus?

I am also wondering how mosquito populations are affected by increasing human populations. I can imagine with a lot of left out garbage collecting standing water plus being a food source could have given mosquitoes a unnatural advantage.

Garbage and standing water benefit all mosquitoes against non-mosquito competitors. We only need to consider whether biting humans benefits human-biting mosquitoes over non-human-biting mosquitoes, or separately whether carrying malaria benefits malaria-carrying mosquitoes over non-malaria-carrying mosquitoes; eliminating either trait would be sufficient. I believe that neither of these are powerful enough, meaning that the malaria-carrying human-biting species can be almost seamlessly replaced by non-human-biting or non-malaria-carrying species with no risk of the trait re-evolving or of the broader ecological niche, as tiny and unimportant as it is, failing to be re-filled.

Is it that surprising? Populations of animals that depend on humans has generally expanded with people. This applies to livestock, pets, vermin etc.

Mosquitoes are prevalent even in super clean places, btw. I used to live by a small creek in Austin, TX and in the summers I could basically never enjoy my yard: it would be flooded by mosquitoes (the creek would have standing water which mosquitoes require to reproduce).

It's fine being careful but this argument devolves all too often into some kind of religious nature worship. We are the dominant species on this planet. Animals and plant life - nature - have to conform to our wishes. Not the other way around.

I agree, more or less, but I believe that the "We can't possibly predict the effects of this therefore we can't take the risk" argument demands more urgent opposition. I argue that we can predict the effects. They're tiny even in absolute terms, and the uncertainty is well-understood and also small. And in relative terms - These small risks and effects are weighed against a half-million lives per year. I'd be willing to release kudzu or rabbits to save that many lives; eliminating mosquitoes has such insignificant risk relative to its benefit that that risk doesn't even register. Do it now.

The only reason we are the dominant species is because we have resources and ecosystems that can support us. The dominant species won't be so dominant anymore when ecosystems collapse.

I don't think the OP would argue against that point.

Harming nature to the point that it harms humans wouldn't fit into that philosophy.

I'd say the life form that dominates this planet are single cellular organisms, i.e., mostly bacteria. They have run this place for billions of years, deciding who gets to stay in symbiosis with them or not and most likely will continue to do so for a few billion more, long after mammals and similar life forms will have disappeared again. They inhabit the entire biosphere, at least 1km below and up to 50km above earth, filling every cubic meter with millions and often billions of them. They can "communicate" (evolve their latest genetic modifications) across the whole planet in a matter of weeks for particularly mission-critical mutations. Every other life-form just passes by.

Uh no, we don't have the power to live without nature. We have a lot of power but we need to be careful wielding it.

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