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Comment by afarrell | Hacker News Reader

I wonder how much ecological damage is done by humans trying to protect their communities from disease borne mosquitos.

I grew up with parents that urged me to prevent pools of standing water, but don’t lots of non-mosquito insects need standing water to breed?

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>I grew up with parents that urged me to prevent pools of standing water, but don’t lots of non-mosquito insects need standing water to breed?

Sure, they can use the other pools of standing water not near humans. The reason it works to limit some species of mosquito (mostly aedes aegypti) is that they preferentially seek to bite humans and so live near them. Other bugs seek out plants and other bugs so they can live elsewhere.

There are more than 7 billion humans in the world and lots of agricultural land is required to feed the ones in cities. How much land area is not near humans?

A lot. Humans are clustered.

Roughly half of the habitable land in the world is used for agriculture. Of the remaining half, only about 1% is developed in any sense.

Aedes Aegypti can breed in jars, tires, basically anything that holds water. No need for pools of standing water.

quite - presumably there are other animals eating these insects.

Then again, malaria kills lots and lots of people every year, and I suspect if I was in a malaria-prone country I might feel different about the balance of protecting humans vs potential ecological effects (even if in the long term this might cause big negative changes)

Those "pools" are already man-made ecological systems. Not much to upset there. And you really don't want to live in a swamp, so any swamps that occupy desirable real estate are pretty much f*ed anyway.

I know that certain species of Killifish in Africa can survive and reproduce in pools left behind by foot-prints. So, yes, quite interesting micro-ecosystems can exist.

You can populate pools of standing water with fish that eat mosquito larvae like Gambusia affinis, Phoxinus phoxinus etc.

https://pondinformer.com/pond-fish-that-eat-mosquito-larvae/

In practice, I don’t have the time. Someone with easy access to the supply chain for that fish-stocking might though.

How many mosquito control agencies is that?

I realize I could have made my point more explicit: I suspect that we should do this so that we can remove the incentives for humans to spread pesticides and do other habitat-damaging things.

Keep in mind malaria also kills lots of animals besides humans.

Those animals now not dying, might cause further ecological damage. Ecosystems tend to have a rather delicate balance and viruses play their part.

Thousands of insects and animals species appeared and disappeared before humans existed, countless of times, so I wouldn't give that much weight to existent equilibriums; what we can do is being aware of the changes, e.g. if we detect a sudden increase in spiders population we can check what is killing the frogs and act accordingly

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