This is why Verily's https://debug.com/ project is so interesting.
The idea is to create modified mosquitoes that can't bite or breed and release them to "breed" with the general populous thus neutralizing them.
The idea is to create modified mosquitoes that can't bite or breed and release them to "breed" with the general populous thus neutralizing them.
Otherwise this reminds me of well-meaning efforts to control erosion by planting Kudzu or Himalayan Blackberry everywhere. Ultimately they just become an invasive species. And I could also see eradicating mosquitoes as removing a food species for many other animals. This is a really bad idea.
>We conclude that predators and parasites have a limited but significant effect on overall mosquito populations, and their role should be considered when implementing habitat management, mosquito control and when modeling mosquito population dynamics.
From a study http://e-m-b.org/sites/e-m-b.org/files/European_Mosquito_Bul...
The problems eradication solves are obvious and important to solve.
The problems eradication might cause are less obvious and are potentially disastrous.
Many of the mosquitos are invasive species anyway. The point being, there are many many of species which would fill up the ecological niche left if we extincted a few.
Next to that it's not only the side effect of extinction of one species, but also the unforeseen side effects of the technologies used to accomplish this (extreme) extinction.
The whole point of technologists is that they really have to much faith that we both understand these complex ecosystems and complex technologies we just started using.
To try to put a technology on grand scale that you don't fully understand and can't control once in the wild is really stupid.
I really want to believe that doing this would be something that humans should explore, but I think the chance of something going wrong is fairly high. Considering our rather terrible track record with stuff like this (weapons, pesticides, etc).
It often takes decades to truly see how it works, so while we may end the mosquitos problem we may make ourselves a worse one.
Also, the mosquito lifecycle is as little as a week or two from egg to egg. The process would be rather fast.