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Comment by eranation | Hacker News Reader

I think you'll be surprised by the lack of retaliation and even cheers you'll get around. No one likes mosquitoes. And I think I read somewhere (and I'm too tired to google it) that ecologists believe there will be little to no harm to the ecosystem if they will just one day poof away from the face of the earth. Even animal rights organizations will meh over it.

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"there will be little to no harm to the ecosystem if they will just one day poof away from the face of the earth"

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.

Wouldn't other mosquito species start becoming vectors though? It's not like the niche the vector is occupying goes away.

I expect that would depend on why only certain species can transmit human malaria. Yes if the reason is purely regional, but if there's something else (length of lifecycle, presence or absence of certain enzymes, ability to take blood from human) then there would have to be incredibly fast adaptation for malaria to survive.

The parasites don't survive equally well even within the species they inhabit.

https://www.cdc.gov/malaria/about/biology/mosquitoes/

Probably not. Humans have eliminated many species and the niches they occupied haven't been always been filled by other species. Megafauna on many continents is a good example.

The thing that makes Aedes aegypti such a good vector is its tendency to feed on multiple humans. They get spooked and fly off from a feeding site, then land again to try again, and the subsequent bites might not be on the same human. So one infected mosquito can vector a disease to an entire room of people if there is enough activity to make them attempt that many bites.

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.

You are joking, right?

No, this is the common understanding.

No genuine scientific conclusion confirms this. It's a hypothesis and one we have no way of testing, but people think it sounds awesome so they spread it without a good understating.

We definitely don’t know for sure, but we absolutely know the harm caused by malaria and dengue. (I personally care about this from living in places with both, and because Elon Musk almost died from dengue, apparently.)

Everyone almost died of a lot of things. We're all lucky to be alive. For people in countries with Malaria, its like the flu. In fact, flu also kills a lot of people.

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.

I have a hard time believing mosquitos aren't a significant food source for something. What takes their place? And anyway, why would we need to make them extinct everywhere, and not just places people live?

Mosquitoes are a large food source for birds, especially migratory birds in the northern regions.

Eliminating them would be devastating to Scandinavia's biodiversity.

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