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Comment by specialp | Hacker News Reader

If they released this to eliminate Asian Tiger Mosquitoes from the USA it would be a perfect limited scope experiment. They have out competed other mosquitoes in my area and are invasive. They also spread disease and bite 24 hours a day making everyone's lives miserable outdoors. I wouldn't miss them at all. And there's not much life depending on eating Asian Tiger Mosquito larvae from trash with tiny pools of water. They don't make much of a meal for any animal or insect or we'd have far fewer.

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It’s disturbing to realize that people here baying form this to be rolled out seemingly know very little about the topic. Mosquitoes aren’t just food for other insects, and bats, and birds, they’re also pollinators. In the context of how many insects and bees we’re killing by other means, it’s hard to predict how much of a critical role mosquitoes play in that regard. Insect numbers have been cratering lately, and kicking whole species off a cliff may not matter, or it may be a critical step. When considering these actions we have to remember just how much stress we are already putting on the food web, and how much more we’ll stress it in the future.

The tiger mosquito your parent mentions, though, is invasive. Ecologists are usually more than happy to target invasive species.

True, but in the context of a pilot program to target native species elsewhere. In short it wouldn’t meet that criteria, because the Asian Tiger mosquito is a recent invader. In the narrow case of targeting recent (decades rather than centuries, and then ATM qualifies as the former) invaders alone, I agree that few rational people would object.

> in the context of a pilot program to target native species elsewhere

Isn't this just defining the scope artificially narrowly to deny that it would be a useful experiment?

Is there an ecologically significant difference in targeting an invasive species?

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