> Within a month we destroyed the mosquito population. We could actually go outside in short sleeves again. We were very, very happy.
> It didn’t take long to notice the change in the ecology, however. Being in a rural area we had a large amount of diverse animals and birds. When the mosquitoes went, all the birds went too. Not a few birds, not just the song birds, but all the birds. We created our own “silent spring”. The bats and dragonflies also went away and with them many of the fish in the lake became more voracious and desperate to eat, which meant that they were much easier to catch. In a short time the lake was fished out. And because all the birds were gone we got a tick explosion. Instead of mosquitoes we now have ticks everywhere. It’s annoying to be constantly pulling off ticks, checking for ticks and finding ticks attached to one’s genitals. In addition, there have been a number of cases of Lyme disease as a result.
...
> The Law of Unintended Consequences is a very powerful law. You may be attempting to do something good over here but the result is an unforeseen and negative change in the infrastructure over there. It’s funny now how we get together outside and notice how dead we’ve made the area by killing all the mosquitoes. It looks beautiful, just like the environment looks OK in Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring”, beautiful to look at, but devoid of life, devoid of sound and requiring constant laundry, showering and tick checks. It’s extremely disheartening to come into the house and finding a tick attached to your genitals. And although we cannot attribute it to our killing of the mosquitoes, the leech population has exploded in the lake as well. Maybe the loss of all the fish that ate the mosquitoes and leeches allowed the explosion of the leech population.
There's less consensus among scientists than there is on Quora. A few interviews and quotes:
* “Ecology: A world without mosquitoes”, Janet Fang, Nature, 21 July 2010. https://www.nature.com/news/2010/100721/full/466432a.html
* “Zika Raises the Question: Are Mosquitoes Necessary?”, Jason Bittel, National Geographic, February 7, 2016. https://news.nationalgeographic.com/2016/02/160207-mosquitoe...
* “What If Every Mosquito On Earth Went Extinct Tomorrow?”, Ria Misra, October 15, 2017. https://news.nationalgeographic.com/2016/02/160207-mosquitoe...
I'll tentatively add that this topic came up at a dinner with Pardis Sabetti https://www.sabetilab.org and George Church http://arep.med.harvard.edu/gmc/. At the time, neither of them thought mosquitos were an essential part of any animal's food chain. Except that I'm not 100% sure we were talking about mosquitoes at the time – maybe we were talking about some species of bats. :-(
[By the way, Grayson Brown's quote “the ecological damage […] would make eradication not worth it unless there was a very serious public health emergency” may sound clueless or heartless. Charitably, maybe he was referring to eradication in developed nations only, and maybe the full interview – which I haven't listened to – makes this clear.]
Just think about it: 12 homeowners around a single lake fight mosquitoes so effectively that even eagles disappear from the area?
"You literally had to run from your car to the house" isn't how you would like to live for the entirety of your life. Of course I don't have high hopes for Californians to understand this.
Tbe bottom line of the article is:
> I’m not going to kid you. It’s excellent now that the mosquitoes are gone. We don’t regret making that big effort.
But eradicating mosquitoes is a bad idea. My hunch is that in most cases, they act as genetic pollinators, incremental vaccinators carrying the latest news of disease so that animals can react.
The issue is not about land area, it's about fauna biomass location. Think more like this:
https://static6.businessinsider.com/image/582c7dd8ba6eb69a01...
On the vaccination issue, I encourage you to look up Jenner and his realization of the link between cowpox and smallpox. It's a good foundation for GP's idea.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Jenner#Invention_of_the...
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1200696/
I'm not certain of mosquito-per-fauna-biomass distributions, nor GP's thesis, but it's not a bad one overall and may have merit.
If people in arid land can live healthy without mosquitoes, I think it's a good bet that people in wetter land can too.
They actually do. They protect the environment by culling local pests like humans.
do you mean the niche of malaria transmitter? I suppose it wouldn't be that hard for another species of mosquito to become a transmitter.
Anyway, out of curiosity i once spent some time correlating genetically modified mosquito releases with the modern Zika outbreaks (there weren't Zika outbreaks before 2007 according to WHO, only like 14 separate cases) - the Zika outbreaks started in 2007 and for the most of them it was possible to find information that there were a release of those mosquito in the area of the outbreak 1-3 years before the outbreak (in the case of Gabon 2007 outbreak it was those mosquito development and testing in previous years on an island off the cost of Gabon. Another 2007 outbreak - Yap island - also seems being a testing ground in the years leading to the outbreak).
This has been studied, though. No animal only eats mosquitoes, and I’d only start with a few species (but likely expand to all of them.)
DDT was supposed to be a risk-free way of killing mosquitoes. Nobody knew the side effect existed.
This is an example of score insensitivity. How many humans die each year of malaria? If this was in Europe or America we would already have done it.
The potential benefits of gene drives are so vast that (to me) this overwhelms other concerns (yes, even if you successfully eliminated all mosquito borne diseases).
I'd love to see (biting) mosquitos eradicated, but I've come to believe that the slow process of an "official" eradication program is ultimately superior (despite finding the humanitarian toll of delay sickening).
Happy to elaborate if it might help you think things through.
You know who also annoy me? Roaches. Do you suggest searching for a peace threaty with them?
Well, perhaps not if the specific species that carry the diseases vanish. Eliminating all mosquitoes would almost certainly have an effect.
Of course, that's one reason why gene drives are so attractive -- you can target individual species, rather than indiscriminately killing every insect in the area.
Many other mosquitoes will just stick it out and hope you don't notice them before they fill up. They either succeed in one bite or get squashed. Those mosquitoes have less opportunity to acquire a disease from an infected human, and less opportunity to transmit one to an uninfected human. And if there is no mechanism for that vector to pass to a mosquito's offspring, the one-bite behavior means there is no transmission between humans at all.
The parasites don't survive equally well even within the species they inhabit.
Eliminating them would be devastating to Scandinavia's biodiversity.
What's the solution to diseases? Improving peoples' general health and wellbeing, so that their immune systems can handle the disease. The solution is not to eradicate an entire species in the middle of an already distraught global ecological catastrophe.
For every instance of a mosquito causing a malarial infection, there are likely uncountable instances of mosquitoes causing inoculation.