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Comment by colordrops | Hacker News Reader

Every creature in an ecosystem serves some niche and is part of a very complex balance, and willful eradication of an entire species is extremely irresponsible in that no one can know every consequence.

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On the other hand, letting them live is disastrous too. Malaria has killed half of all people who have ever lived. Also, we unintentionally destroy a lot of species every year, often with little direct consequence to humans, so destruction of another one isn't necessarily ecologically disastrous. Of course, it could still be a bad idea, and we shouldn't do it without sufficient research, but the option to do shouldn't be dismissed outright.

Maybe without that humans would have overpopulated the earth and driven everything to extinction much quicker that what is happening now?

The issue with most current mosquito control (https://www.wired.com/2016/06/zika-mosquitos/) and actually most insect control in general is that, historically and even heavily today, they generally involved chemicals (pesticides). Pesticides in general are not insect specific, and can have some rather serious effects on the environment, other animals, and even maybe humans. They also only tend to be effective against mosquitoes for, say, a couple decades or so before mosquitoes develop resistance, and a new one has to be deployed.

I definitely would personally welcome research on efforts to more specifically target the mosquito and the mosquito alone. Chemical based insect control isn't going to go away in the absence of alternatives, meaning that, should an alternative, mosquito specific approach be developed, it probably will have much less "knock on effects" to the ecosystem compared to what we are already doing.

Aedes aegypti are an invasive species to the U.S. [0] so there's little evidence that they would greatly negatively affect the ecosystem if they were to suddenly be eradicated.

[0]: https://ecdc.europa.eu/en/disease-vectors/facts/mosquito-fac...

That response has always struck me as FUD. You could say the same thing about the actual diseases humanity is trying to, and has successfully gotten rid of. What if the response to people trying to eradicate smallpox was that we should keep it around because we don’t know what the consequence of getting rid of it is? Well, we would still have smallpox around... Should we keep polio around too? Not snarky—is like to understand. Sometimes a known good is better than an unknown bad.

OTOH we're eradicating dozens of species every day without thinking too much about it. Maybe we should eradicate a couple that are actually harmful to us.

I thought scientists agreed that wasn't true for the mosquitoes that bite us.

As far as we know*, which is a pretty substantial disclaimer.

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