Comment by ryanseys | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ryanseys | Hacker News Reader

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The general understanding is that these creatures, at least far as the U.S. ecosystem is concerned, is that they are an invasive species and provide very little value to the rest of the ecosystem.

The Debug FAQ [1] under "Challenges and Impact" actually has a good answer on this that I'll copy below:

> What’s the ecological impact of reducing Aedes aegypti mosquito populations?

> Globally, there are already extensive attempts underway to reduce Aedes aegypti populations in urban environments to protect human health. Aedes aegypti is an invasive species that almost exclusively feeds on humans in order to reproduce. They are native to some parts of Africa, but international trade and other human activity have allowed Aedes aegypti to spread widely. These mosquitoes invade and proliferate in new communities every year, putting more and more people at risk for mosquito-borne diseases.

> The general consensus among scientists is that the ecological impact of removing Aedes aegypti mosquitoes from urban environment would be small. They are not a significant food source for other animals and don't help pollinate crops. The main ecological impact would be to restore the ecosystem to how it was before the mosquitoes invaded.

> For these reasons, the ecological risk of this project is low, particularly when compared to the impact of existing control methods that can be broadly toxic to humans and the environment, and the Debug team is committed to working with communities and regulators to ensure the safety and acceptability of our field trials and releases.

[1]: https://debug.com/faqs/

Thank you for that.

Would introducing bat colonies - kind of like bee hives, which could be moved around serve to help eat some mosquitos?

I've heard that bats prefer bigger insects and don't eat all that many mosquitoes.

The problem is that most cities are too noisy for them (and that agriculture uses a lot of biocides).

To put some things in context also, there are 34 millions of new citizens in USA since 2004. We can expected some increase in people bitten just by this. The population had increased therefore the cases also did (but does not explain all the increase)

Some bats are good to hunt mosquitos, some birds are good also, but there are other options. One of them is well known, easy to manage, hard (can starve for weeks), totally silent, harmless and can adapt easily to a human environment: spiders. Would be much much easier to promote than bats.

The other big group is inexplicably neglected, their real role and statistics as mosquito predators are poorly studied, and most people is not even aware of their existence even if they are 100% designed to overpower mosquitoes in its own game. They can fight them in the open air where spiders can't. I'm talking of flies. Some flies are big mosquito killers.

But I bet that most experts on Asilidae struggle each month to find enough funds for keeping their research alive.

Bats are rabies vectors, so you'd have to look at the cost/benefit analysis on an uptick in rabies vs. a downtick in mosquito-borne diseases. I'm sure this has been done but I don't have a citation handy.

Maybe, but from a balcony of a condo I used to have in downtown Austin I could look down at the world’s largest urban bat colony sleeping under the Congress St bridge over our downtown lake[1]. The over a million bats would fly out in an amazing cloud each evening and fly down the lake in mass searching for insects to eat. It was an impressive sight, especially when they chose to fly toward my building splitting around it in flight a few floors below my view.

I used to use the running trail around our downtown lake frequently and I could hear the bats making sounds above me as I ran under the bridge. Occasionally, I would wonder about those stories of spelunkers getting rabies from just breathing the virus from a large subterranean colony, but thousands of people use Austin’s most popular running trail with apparently no ill effects from the close proximity to so many bats.

[1] https://www.cnn.com/videos/travel/2017/07/28/with-me-as-your...

Yes, I've stood under the Congress Avenue bridge at dusk too (while wearing a hat for guano protection). It's an amazing sight. And it's true that not very many bats have rabies, but a few do. The risk is small but not zero.

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