We Crush, Poison, and Destroy Insects at Our Own Peril | Hacker News Reader

We Crush, Poison, and Destroy Insects at Our Own Peril

nautil.us

I think one of the problems with most of the climate change and environmental articles like this is that they focus entirely on the negative.

We aren’t going to see the massive cultural change that it would take to bring massive (positive) environmental change, until we have a shared narrative of how it’s going to be awesome and make life better for all of us.

Collective action to “stop the bad thing” just doesn’t happen at the scale required unless the harm is severe, immediate, and personal. Environmental damage is not like that: each individual can barely perceive it. We do see some cultural change on the things people can perceive (such as recycling and litter reduction, the tremendous growth of “organic food”). But the majority of major environmental problems are big cumulative things that happen slowly over time and are hard for individuals to perceive.

Meanwhile, you read an alarmist article and the question is “so what am I supposed to do about it?” Until we have a shared narrative on what it is we’re supposed to be doing about it, and that shared narrative paints the picture of a better future where everyone can see themselves being happier, healthier, etc., bottom-up change won’t happen.

And in the western democracies, you (by design), won’t get dramatic, sweeping change until there’s broad bottom-up support.

What if the necessary change is something like lowering the standard of living in order to reduce net resource consumption? If people will never voluntarily do that, then how do you propose to sell that as leading to a sunny future?

This might be why these articles are never positive. Because there isn't a solution that people will like or vote for. No one is going to publish your article if it says we need to impose limits on births or reduce everyone's standard of living to that of sub-Saharan Africa.

> And in the western democracies, you (by design), won’t get dramatic, sweeping change until there’s broad bottom-up support.

Yes, this is precisely why there won't be the necessary change. And it's a great argument against democracy.

One possibility is that it will never happen and we’re doomed. Unfortunately, a lot of people believe that.

But how does Tesla sell its cars for double the price of comparable gas-powered autos? How does Whole Foods sell people on $6 tomatoes?

Both of those represent a choice to consume less, since inherently if you spend more money on something than you have to, then you have less money with which to consume other things.

Yet nobody buying Whole Foods thinks they are “decreasing their standard of living.” Its the opposite!

So the very first thing, if you want to pursue change, is get this idea of “standard of living” out of your head. Think of lifestyle instead.

Can you sell people on an alternative lifestyle that results in less consumption? YES. This happens all around us all the time.

It doesn’t even have to be glamorous. During the world wars, gas was rationed and slops were collected for pigs... people bought war bonds, etc.

Free people can and do rise to meet collective challenges when they are well-led.

Right now it’s very hard to argue the west (as a whole) is well-led.

But things can change. There is a recipe that has a better chance of success, and historical precedent. So don’t give up hope.

I guess it hasn't occurred to you yet that most people can't afford Teslas and $6 tomatoes even in 1st world countries?

That’s a needlessly insulting way of disagreeing.

My point is not that everyone can afford these things. It’s that, among the people who can, they are consuming _less_ and seeing it as a lifestyle upgrade, not as a lowered standard of living. But you could argue that it is both, since it means less net consumption. This is why “standard of living” arguments are fruitless IMO and “lifestyle” is where we should focus.

For something that most first-world folks can afford, look at Apple products. They cost more, so people who buy them necessarily have less money to spend on other things. But nobody thinks their standard of living went down because they bought one iPhone instead of two Androids.

The point is I believe it is possible to get people to voluntarily consume less stuff if and when they feel that their quality of life is better as a result. That’s a lot about perception and social norms, and about things feeling “nice.”

If we put as much energy into thinking of how to make a sustainable low-impact lifestyle enjoyable as we do worrying about environmental harm, we would make more progress. Maybe a lot more.

> But nobody thinks their standard of living went down because they bought one iPhone instead of two Androids.

What?!

> The point is I believe it is possible to get people to voluntarily consume less stuff if and when they feel that their quality of life is better as a result. If we put as much energy into thinking of how to make a sustainable low-impact lifestyle enjoyable

Suppose I told you that the richest 10% of humanity - most of us reading - would have to give up 90% of our consumption?

There isn't going to be some "enjoyable" way to give up 90% of our consumption, because most of us are hooked on consumption.

Think of humans as a drug addict, where the drug is fossil fuels in specific, and unlimited consumer consumption in general.

Withdrawal from the drug isn't going to be "enjoyable" and a lot of people are going to hate it.

I think that's partially because we've built a society where the only good thing that society provides most people with is consumption. If we want things to change, then society is going to need to change.

> One possibility is that it will never happen and we’re doomed. Unfortunately, a lot of people believe that.

It's unfortunate, but gosh, there are a whole lot of people on the planet. Something like 8 billion? I mean, that is a really high number for megafauna. People need to eat a lot, pets eat a lot, people want a warm house and hot water and so on. Setting aside cars and air travel and useless consumerism entirely, the energy it takes to provide all this food and heating is just a stupefyingly high amount. It is challenging to imagine people will set aside fossil fuels, raising crops with pesticides, and even procreation until absolutely forced to by external, nonpolitical, non-negotiable factors.

Getting wealthy people to spend a little more on things to which they might assign some luxury value / extra quality / better virtue is just spitting into the ocean. People-at-large simply do not live long enough and are not wired to do what's necessary to avoid eventual catastrophe. It'll be "let's try to be comfortable for a few more years while we figure this out," and then the next wave will try the same thing, and so on. Thanks to better living through chemistry, the species has gone from zero to looming disaster within the span of a few individual lifetimes.

I guess the good news is, in the long run, the Earth will be just fine.

>Both of those represent a choice to consume less

There's something wrong with this idea, that spending more on consumption means consuming less.

When you spend $20K extra on your Tesla, doesn't it enable that much extra consumption by their employees, stockholders, etc., which in turn has an average carbon intensity or other environmental impact that is roughly in line with anyone in their society?

Like, the electric car is green, but the money pays for salary which buys a ham sandwich, which pays for a hog farm, which pays for a diesel tractor, and so on. The green-ness of the first transaction seems to me a fig leaf to avoid the truth that every dollar of consumption has about the same environmental impact in the long run.

If the Tesla were not a lot more expensive, then it would be significant that it was green. But people use the concept of externalities as if they were always an infinitely flexible amount and I think it's self-deception.

You just can't do what's right for the environment or social justice via conspicuous consumption, and yet virtually nobody endorses that ethic, because then what are you? You're Scrooge. It's simple, and impossible for normal human beings to accept. You consume, you take away from the poor, and you pollute the environment.

I think there is a lot of good to talk about, with just a little creativity: hundreds of thousands of jobs in a green economy, cleaner cities, ending the dependence on oil from autocratic nations, devices that you can repair and use for decades instead of discarding after eighteen months. You will never convince people to willingly downgrade their standard of living, but you can convince them to side-grade. Can you convince billions of people to turn vegan? Probably not, but you can convince them to eat synthetic meat, specially if it is cheaper, safer, and more consistent than beef from a live cow.

If the future is going to be bleak anyways, then why bother trying to avoid climate change?

Presumably to make it less bleak than it would be otherwise.

I don't see how it would be possible to avoid climate change. But attempting to minimize it, or at least minimize humans' contribution seems preferable to doing nothing.

Lowering our standard to sub-Saharan Africa is a shortcut to extinction. We need science and accompanying "standards" to remain as they are. I'd personally rather look elsewhere before resorting to authoritarianism.

What we IMO need is a push towards more technology, actually more resource use, more science and more rational thinking of any kind in general. We need to get out of the sub-Saharan mindset. Living in harmony with nature is not, and never was, sustainable and if it ever held any weight it is now a hollow, unproductive pipe-dream. We are created to do interesting things, hence the brains. So let's make interesting shit happen instead of waving flags in each-other's face and complaining about not being in harmony with the gods.

You ask how we sell that as a sunny future? Assuming the unwashed masses want to face the truth I'd think after some scrubbing they'd generally be onboard with a rational, abundance-filled, space-faring fucking utopia. Engaging further with our cultural and religious psychoses should be disincentivized and probably banned as the extinction-level threat it is. If you ask me, nationalism is the greatest threat humanity ever faced.

Also - while we still have nations - not voting for raging religious demagogues would be a start.

> Lowering our standard to sub-Saharan Africa is a shortcut to extinction.

> Living in harmony with nature is not, and never was, sustainable

> need is a push towards… more resource use

> We are created to do interesting things, hence the brains

Nothing above is true. Humans are exactly like cancer cells on Earth and may be universe is we go everywhere. Grow at any cost and kill the host finally. If we are capable of doing good ethical things does not matter because we never did that and will not. Uncomfortable but truth.

It's all every species are though. Consume the resource, survive yourself. There's a natural way of balancing the amount of consumers if resources aren't enough. Wolves population will die out to a smaller number if there's not enough food even after moving places. We could be limited by that, or we could step over it using science. After all wild cats don't think if it's ethical to eat prey. Or understand the concept of ethics. But we do.

What saves Earth for now is the fact that we can't move away easily. Even with all the money and desire we don't have an independent settlement outside of the planet. There's lot of things required before we are able to, and then even more before moving to Mars, for example, is as easy as moving between Europe and Americas. Then the Earth will be doomed. Who would care about not only insects, but the fate of the planet, when we could just move residents somewhere else. Like we do now on a smaller scale, and always did.

> Engaging further with our cultural and religious psychoses should be disincentivized

The sort of techno-optimism you're espousing here amounts to a religion as well. It's a religion to which the majority of the developed world appears to subscribe. It seems to be losing adherents to disillusionment, albeit incredibly slowly.

The prevalence of views similar to yours are one of the reasons why I don't foresee a positive future. I suspect society will continue down your suggested path of more technology and more resource consumption believing it to lead to some sort of salvation. I see it instead as the furtherance of human's destructive tendencies which have only grown more potent with every increase in humanity's capacity to effect its will via technological development.

> I think one of the problems with most of the climate change and environmental articles like this is that they focus entirely on the negative.

This is because the news about the destruction of our planet is entirely negative - or more specifically, 100 pieces of bad news for every good one.

> Meanwhile, you read an alarmist article

We read an _accurate_ article.

> [until] that shared narrative paints the picture of a better future where everyone can see themselves being happier, healthier, etc., bottom-up change won’t happen.

Such a future does not exist, because we're going to have to cut down on our consumption dramatically to save the Earth.

You are uninterested in hearing about the problem unless there's a solution which makes everyone happy, and since no such solution exists, you just want everyone to stop talking about.

You and people like you are exactly why we will continue on our obsessive consumption until we're past the brink, if we aren't already.

I have a feeling that in a few generations people will look back and wonder how we were so concerned about an iceberg melting when we were eating a credit card per week of plastic and wiping out most of life on earth.

(For the record I do think global warming is a big deal - I just think the latter issues will hurt humanity far more far sooner)

Climate change is one of the main factors in "wiping out most life on earth." Habitat fragmantation means that flora and fauna cannot shift (generally poleward) to remain in regions they are suited to climatically, so the effects of climate change on biodiversity are worse than they would be otherwise. Even without habitat fragmentation, or the other pressures humans exert on the biosphere, the rate of climate change is such that it alone could potentially induce a mass extinction.

I do agree that the biosphere as a whole should be the primary concern and the focus on only one component, namely climate change, is incredibly short sighted.

Global warming is going to be disruptive on the scale of COVID (probably worse), and it's going to happen during our lifetimes.

Without insects for pollination, it will be difficult to feed the current, let alone the growing, world population. At least at a reasonable price.

Artificial pollination works. Just not at the price that nature "demands".

And of course, climate change will play a massive role. But so will the sixth extinction.

Given the fact that we have studies showing -75% of insects in some regions (of Germany) [1], I feel that the system is already way out of bounds.

[1]: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...

When I was a kid (say early 80s) we would go to a camp about 60 minutes drive from our house in the city. In the summer, the round trip would leave a crust of dead inspects on the grill we'd have to scrub off when we washed the car. These days, if I see a bug on the grill it's unusual.

I think that some of this effect is aerodynamics. Insects are pretty small — to get one to splatter on your windshield, the surrounding air needs to be under rather high acceleration so that the insect hits the windshield instead of following the air’s streamlines around your car. This condition isn’t great for aerodynamic drag. Newer cars try harder to be efficient, which reduces their tendency to splatter insects in their paths.

There's plenty of high calorie crops that don't need pollination.

People keep mentioning what annoys them and how much they want it gone ... people here say its not the job of the average joe yet who is going to be affected? ...

Its all our doing. We will bear the brunt, if not the responsibility. I think some of us will survive whats coming .. most, i fear, wont.

As a person who hates to kill bugs (they're alive and absolutely required in nature), I have an agreement with them in my mind:

- The outside is yours, you can do whatever you want there.

- Inside the walls is my own territory. I want you in minimum numbers there.

- If you're an harmless bug (most except cockroaches, centipedes and venomous animals), I'll transport you to nature with utmost care.

Notes:

- Balconies are outside.

- I'll try my best to not to poison outside or kill you in high numbers unless you try to invade my home.

My wife had "Kill on sight" policy for spiders. Lots of screaming included. I have negotiated for them "safe escort to backyard" policy some time ago. Feel much better about them now.

Even after a brown recluse bite, I still will not harm spiders and generally let them be, unless they keep trying to drown themselves in my shower, in which case it is Spider Rescue Time.

One spider took up residence in an upper corner of my shower during a time when I had a bizarrely intractable issue with drain flies. All well and good. We developed a routine: I had a series of taps on the stall I would deliver, which was Shower Spider's cue to retreat to the web. I then showered and left multiple large drops of water on the nearby ledge to drink. At all times I would fling drain flies (and other randomly encountered bugs) into the web for devouring.

Shower Spider died one day and I was never able to determine why. Water and bugs were delivered by me on the regular. We had a really good working relationship. Other Shower Spiders have come and gone, but the first one was a real trooper.

Probably killed itself out of boredom at having such an easy-going life. Alternatively, there was something toxic in the water which they were drinking.

In a sense spiders are part of the problem - insect killers. I keep one in the kitchen window, and a little jumping one lives on the bedroom roof, migrates across to the windows a couple of times a day, but all others strictly belong outside.

Jumping spiders are amazing, and have such complex behaviour and the ability to learn. For sure tiny creatures they pack a lot in.

I love spiders but avoid touching them if I can.

Jumping spiders make for great pets. Watching them hunt is fascinating, they'll crawl all over anything you put in the terrarium, and they can go without food for weeks at a time. Very low maintenance. And they're usually comfortable with climbing into your palm. I don't do it, because I worry about injuring or stressing them, but my wife loves it. We've never been bitten by a jumping spider.

If you don't like the idea of catching and caging spiders, keep one by a window. The small amount of webbing they leave isn't prominent, unless they have trouble climbing (like in glass terrariums).

Sadly they aren't wild here in the UK, but I've read a lot about them and enjoy the local spiders we get here. Spiders and octopus definitely would be ruling the world if they wanted to.

My wife and I are apparently both in the subset of the population for whom Charlotte's Web made a big impression. We leave spiders alone and let them (or the cat) do most of our dirty work. Other arthropods get a paper-towel ride to the yard.

I allow non-web-making spiders to stay inside, and I escort non-venomous web-making spiders outside. Anything venomous that can come back around and hurt me or my family gets a quick warrior's death.

My policy is ignore them unless my wife complains (she hates big bugs for some reason) or they can cause harm to us or our dogs (yellow jackets, centipedes).

For the former I'll make an attempt to capture and transport outside (and if not I'll leave it alone), if it's the latter I'll either try to shoo it outside or kill it, with killing being the last resort.

I don't use pesticides or weed killer and I also actively leave a couple patches of wild flowers and clover in the back yard unmowed for bees and butterflies and other insects to use. If my dogs didn't like trying to eat bees I would consider doing some sort of beekeeping.

> My policy is ignore them

I can't ignore them indoors because they multiply quickly.

> unless my wife complains (she hates big bugs for some reason)

Some of us are absolutely terrified of bugs and spiders. Some of it is fueled by not knowing the true nature of them and some of it is instinctive. Also traumatic events in the childhood involving bugs play a big role too.

I have the same base thinking, but had to adjust a lot as reality quickly becomes complicated.

For instance running after moths at night isn’t fun, and they don’t bring much troubles so I gave up on the in/out separation for them.

Or spiders: people who don’t want insects in their house might want to let spiders and other predators live with them, as a helping factor.

And then bringing plants inside also bring other kind of life and a lot of tradeoffs depending on the species.

> people who don’t want insects in their house might want to let spiders and other predators live with them, as a helping factor.

The spiders I have locally tend to hoard the dead, empty shells of the pillbugs (mostly) or millipedes (in one interesting case) that I presume they once caught and ate. They make for "interesting" caches to find.

Ugly[0] as they are, centipedes are exceptional insect killers. It is worth considering letting the occasional common house centipede just go about its business. If you are seeing a lot of them though that's indicative of a really big problem.

[0] "Ugly" is used here as a stand-in for "fundamentally terrifying to many people"

I have had house centipedes everywhere I’ve lived. I prefer them to almost any bug. They are very useful for pest control. Similar diet to spiders as I understand it, and I find them much less “frightening”. My deal with them is they need to stay out of my bed. They have had no issue with that...However, my wife’s rule is they have to stay out of her sight. she generally falls asleep on the earlier side. Especially now that we have children. This keeps the centipedes safe and the pest numbers low.

I've also had centipedes everywhere I've lived, but find them absolutely terrifying. They just send my spine ringing. With that said, in my current house I try to let them be. For now, they mainly stick to the basement which is OK by me.

I got over my aversion to house centipedes by thinking of them as "the cat of the insect world." Of course there are limits to allowable bedroom proximity.

Insects don't care about your charity. For each one you interwct with there are hundreds more out of sight. The one you saved will die of old age in a few weeks.

There are probably quite many bugs "inside your walls" in the literal sense.

Fair if you ask me.. i practiced extreme meditation and sat with mosquitos one day .. it did wonders to how much i get stung now ..

They still take a bite or two on occasion.. it itches for less than an hour (worst was a week before did this ..) but not like before - its as if they let me be after i let them be.

There seems to be a strange relationship between prey and predator we still haven't understood that yet.

What makes centipedes harmful?

They grow big, move fast, bite and are too delicate to carry without hurting them.

I'm actually afraid of bugs, so trying not to hurt them and acting cool is very energy consuming for me.

They can get quite large, depending on where you are in the world. South America has ones that get 12 inches long and are venomous. I believe India also has some fairly large and venomous ones.

I don't know if any of the centipedes in the continental US are problematic like that or not.

> I think some of us will survive whats coming

What is going to come?

Cascading collapses due to breakages in the food chain and population booms due to lack of predators for certain species.

Both will feed the cycles of imbalance more and more.

I'll take predictions of doom I've been hearing since my childhood for $100 Alex.

When I was a kid it was acid rain and the hole in the ozone layer.

Thankfully, thanks to legislation (reducing SO2 emissions for the acid rain, the Montreal Protocol banning the production of CFC's and co on the other) those issues have been resolved.

What predictions of doom have you heard from your childhood that are still a thing? I mean climate change is still a thing, and it seems to take a lot more investments to resolve it.

And the constant threat of nuclear annihilation.

We are right in the middle of a mass extinction event and continue to mess with systems we don't fully understand. How long do you think we can go on like this until it affects rich people in developed nations?

The past is a only a good predictor of the future when the past resembles the present.

Perhaps the game we're actually playing is generational musical chairs.

Empty sarcasm is corrosive to adult conversations. Please avoid it in future.

Because the website seems down: https://web.archive.org/web/20210125095633/http://nautil.us/...

I think the mobile version is down (the one it is linked to), this one works for me: https://nautil.us/issue/95/escape/we-crush-poison-and-destro...

Highly recommend A Sting in the Tale and A Buzz in the Meadow. Both by Dave Goulson, entomologist focusing primarily on bees. A Buzz in the Meadow is a bit more general than A Sting in the Tale. I enjoyed them both.

The problem here is lack of "species-targeted pesticides"(biopesticides), current insecticides are broad-spectrum chemicals that will poison every insect(and aquatic animals too).

Wind turbine blades in many parts of the world are regularly coated in insect biomass.

Yes, we destroy the environment all the time. Yet nothing major gets done about it. The average person isn't the one that needs convincing, it's the higher ups and how to reach them?

Joe Biden got the US back to the Paris agreement, I hope that changes something for the better.

> The average person isn't the one that needs convincing

If the average person cared enough there would be political pressure on those higher ups. Looking at how people vote (not just thinking about US here) I'm not convinced people care all that much.

Research shows that the US govt is essentially an oligarchy. The opinions of ordinary people simply don't count for the ruling elites. Yes its up to us to make more noise and put pressure on leaders.

Maybe the problem is depending too much on active voting rights. I feel that in the netherlands, if you really want to make a change, you have to form a (one issue) party and convince people.

The impact of a single active voter is not big, and especially in a country where there is limited passive voting, e.g, a 2 party country like the US, it is hard to impact a change.

In this sense, US democracy is broken compared to the Netherlands, as there is very little room for passive voting other than being part of a large existing party.

As I said, not just talking about US here...

In Sweden the green party is dangerously close to getting ejected from the parliament. They need +4% of the votes to stay. The issue for them have been that they had to make a lot of uncomfortable compromises to have any influence at all. Feels like that is the fate of any party that wants to have any kind of progressive agenda. Death by a thousand compromises.

And yet, the difference between Trump or Biden winning was only in the thousands thanks to the current system. That is, it's possible that if the 'rona and Trump's mismanagement of it didn't cause >400.000 deaths, he might've gotten a second term.

Just a note, according to all major sources, Biden won by 7,060,140 votes total. Not saying those 400k deaths may not have influenced certain key swing districts. But there was definitely a much larger gap than 'thousands'.

That's in terms of nationwide total vote count. That's not how the electoral college works though. Biden won by a few thousand votes in a few key swing states. Therefore, it is more accurate to say that Biden won by a few thousand votes.

It's not that people don't care, it's that they've been put into a position where they have to care about other things more. The greatest threat for the average person isn't climate change, it's going broke. When you're living paycheck to paycheck, dumping every penny you earn into rent, food and (in the US) student loans and basic healthcare, are you really going to vote for the people who want to raise your taxes, ban the cheap crap you buy and regulate their employers who will pass the expense down to you in order to keep their margins high?

No, all of those things are immediate dangers to your ability to survive. Add to that the constant threats that terrorists/immigrants/communists... are "coming to destroy our freedoms/way of life" and people have so many more (both real and fake) threats looming over them that the distant and (to some) uncertain threat of climate change is basically at the bottom of their priority list.

Well, it's a bit more complicated than that. The problem here is that most of this issues have no visible direct correlation to our actions as humans, so to convince the average person you have to teach them very, very well. And starting from the very beginning, when they are small children. And that's not quick.

So, while this solution must be pursued for sure, at the same time we need quicker actions on those issues, and the quickest way is to deploy them at the management/politicians/law levels.

> The average person isn't the one that needs convincing

I live near a bus stop, there is a trash can. You'd think people would have the common sense to use it. But not so, they would rather throw it behind the bus shelter.

I picked up three bin-bags of litter last night. I do this daily.

Just make mosquitoes disappear. The rest of the insects can be managed, but mosquitoes are the worst of them.

The diseases they transmit notwithstanding, I would take 10x the mosquitoes if it meant ticks, bot flies, intestinal worms, brain eating amoeba and any other parasitic creepy crawlies were gone for good.

There is some research that shows that done of these parasites may have the beneficial action of preventing autoimmune disease by modulating the immune system response. See the layman version [0] or a more scholarly version [1].

[0] https://kids.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/frym.2018.00032

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1618732/

Yeah, some of these parasites really wouldn't be missed at all.

To be fair, ticks, intestinal worms, and amoebae are not insects.

I thought that ticks are insects?

however the diseases they cause are caused by bacteria and other non-insects which they carry around, which I think is the point

Ticks are arachnids and have 8 legs.

Ticks have eight legs and are thus not insects, but more closely related (I think?) to spiders.

I am no biologist, but my guess is that if mosquitoes were extinct, some spider species would too, birds would also be affected, and so on.

There are many species of mosquitos, only a few of them bite people, even fewer live in cities and less than a handful transmit disease. We could start by killing the latter group.

Or breed biteless versions of the biting mozzies?

Are there any mosquitos that live entirely on blood?

Only female mosquitos suck blood, and they only suck blood when developing eggs.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mosquito#Egg_development_and_b...

Dragonflies are pretty ferocious predators of mosquitos where they coexist, and I think I remember reading that dragonfly larvae also prey on mosquito nymphs, although don't quote me on that until I find a cite.

A layer further up, many birds include dragonflies in their diet. And a layer further down, fewer dragonflies means more of everything else they prey on, too.

Wolf spiders will take over. I don't think many people will be happy that they've traded small web slinging spiders for 2" diameter hairy ground spiders.

Wolf spiders do not hunt mosquitoes. The smaller ones may hunt flies, roaches and other terrestrial insects. Weavers will feast on all flying insects, but mosquitoes who are too small.

I know, so getting rid of mosquitoes would get rid of their spider predators, letting would spiders take over.

And bats

Yeah, they can go extinct too. That would have saved us a global pandemic or two.

Why not wipe out pigs and birds, too? That will take care of some more pandemics.

Hope you are not too attached to any of the following crops, which would die off without bats: cacao, peaches, bananas, guava, mango, dates, and figs.

> Hope you are not too attached to any of the following crops, which would die off without bats: cacao, peaches, bananas, guava, mango, dates, and figs.

Fruit bats and mosquito-eating bats are different bats.

Responding to someone saying bats can go extinct. They didn’t specifically mention a type of bats, so it seems it’s out of hatred for bats in general.

that is what Romans did, turning the landscape into a desert, wiping out every civilization that opposed them, and calling it peace.

Sure, no life, means no disease, but that is not really sustainable, isn't it?

Interesting ethical dilemma. If we do ever encounter extraterrestrial life, I sure hope they are less brutal in their judgement of the species here on earth.

If humans start injecting them with diseases then they would be in the right to get rid of us.

I mean, we almost certainly will? What's the difference when every breath is teeming with a colony of completely foreign diseases?

You presume that their biological processes are similar to us, which isn't necessarily true. It almost seems unlikely to be true.

If most of those diseases can't make the jump from a human to a fish or a bird that's from the same planet and even the same evolutionary line, it seems unlikely that we would be susceptible to each other's diseases. This isn't like when Europeans brought Small Pox to the New World; those were still humans.

True, but every once in a blue moon you get a virus that's completely harmless to the host that by pure random luck can make that jump and...gestures broadly

Because life - at least hear on earth - is pretty much made up by all kinds of bacteria and virus.

So aliens might wipe us out, because their system can't handle it. But parent spoke about the right to fight, when we would attack, like ticks do attack us, like other parsites.

It's only about 10 species of mosquito out of thousands that spread malaria. It would be better to wipe out the plasmodium that spreads it.

This was a recent podcast on the subject, if you like your science more lighthearted:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000rcpf

Are we really really sure there won't be any unintended consequences to removing mosquitoes?

Of course not, but when has that ever stopped anyone?

Plenty of animals make mosquitoes (and their eggs) a big part of their diets (fish, birbs, spiders, and usually involuntarily, humans).

Have you looked around you lately? What about the unintended consequences of... all of human technology and civilization? Please, get rid of the mosquitos! I don’t want to have to douse myself in chemicals just to go for a hike or enjoy a weekend of camping.

Mosquitos eat mostly flower nectar. Males never bite. Females still eat nectar but need blood to produce eggs.

Mosquito larvae are very good for filtering water.

Cockroaches too please.

Eliminating 4000 over species of cockroaches because 30 are associated with humans and 5 are pests is extreme, I think [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cockroach

> Cockroaches (or roaches) are insects of the order Blattodea, which also includes termites. About 30 cockroach species out of 4,600 are associated with human habitats. About five species are well known as pests.

As scavengers, cockroaches actually fill a useful economic niche. Mosquitos are just pure shared-needle disease spreaders.

Lots of animals (fish, amphibians, birds, spiders, other insects) depend on mosquitoes as a source of food. Also, lots of plants are pollinated by mosquitoes.

I live in a Mediterranean city, and in summers (hell-hole hot and humid) they're my nightmare. The big ones! They swarm the entire city. I get along well with smaller ones lighter in color though. I freak out the moment I notice one on the wall to the bathroom. Poor me.

We cannot do this in isolation because we never know if that would eg affect bird population or if we geneticaly modify mosquitos that can have unintendend consequences that no study can predict.

Do not fool yourself that you can "make a study" for everything: you cannot. You can never predict what will happen if you mess with nature on a genetic level.

This was already proven to be true when they released some GMO mosquitos which were not being able to reproduce.

BUT WAIT!

They were able to reproduce sooner or later again!

How shocking! Who would have thought!

And those scientists then said "this was not supposed to happen".

These scientists got the problem completely wrong, up-side-down: they believed that they "studied" the problem enough. The believed that they "knew enough" that this "should not have happened".

But they won't ever learn that complex system (which is pretty much everything in nature) cannot be "studied and come to a conclusion with a high degree of confidence".

"High degree of confidence" and "complex system" are opposites that cannot appear in the same sentence.

Everything has unintentional consequences, because nothing exists in isolation. Arguing that doing nothing is the only moral thing to do, because one can not perfectly predict all that will happen when one does something is absurd. As is your mockery of science, that ostentatiously dissing of a straw-man. We all know the scientific method, please don't claim it is about absolute truth and certainty.

The GMO mosquitos are a good path because the direct consequences affect mosquito genes. If it is not effective enough, then we are back to poisoning the water with delta-endotoxins, where we know the consequences on things that are not mosquitos are far more severe.

>If it is not effective enough, then we are back to poisoning the water with delta-endotoxins, where we know the consequences on things that are not mosquitos are far more severe.

This is a good point, and probably has more harmful actions behind it. "Don't do $NEWTHING" is not the same as "do nothing." Think of all the things humans already do to reduce the harm from mosquitos:

- Bug zappers (which aren't even good at attracting mosquitos) - Draining marshlands - Dumping standing water (toads also use this for laying eggs) - Insect repellent (i.e., spreading harmful chemicals in nature) - Introducing predators

Mosquito nets are, AFAICT, the only method without collateral damage.

You didn't get my point.

GMO mosquitos are a completely UNPREDICTABLE path.

The scale of consequences of changes to mosquito DNA is far more predictable then that of chemical water treatment, which, among other things, can and does influence the mosquito genome.

If you want perfect knowledge of everything in all details, then all consequences of every action are unpredictable. Limiting that to only the technology you dislike is unreasonable.

I'd be interested to read a paper discussing what appears to be a previously unsuspected failure mode of sterile insect technique.

Granted, I have to assume that that's what you're talking about under all the absurd hyperbole, because all the absurd hyperbole gets in the way. But if that is what you're trying to get at, do you have a cite?

The hyperbole is not absurd and is there for a reason: it is meant to show people the arrogance of scientists and their inability to comprehend that messing with complex systems has unpredictable consequences that cannot be studied.

I was really hoping that this was sarcasm, but from replies i see that lots of people take it seriously. Wow, i'm shocked, hope we never will have such ability to eliminate a species on demand when someone got annoyed during camping, without even thinking about the consequences of such action and alternatives how desired outcome could be achieved.

AFAIK, mosquitos are the animals that take the most human lives per annum. It is not only about "getting annoyed" during camping.

EDIT, I found a source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_deadliest_animals_to_h...

Let's have humans evolve instead of killing things that were here before us.

Natural history is full of examples of "lets kill things that were here before us". So your argument can't be a reference and a call to a natural state of being. What is it about then?

Ah yes, eugenics. Worked great for the US' native population.

You’re against killing the plague? That’s silly.

I'm trying to remember where I read it, but someone once penned an article, crying about the crime of exterminating smallpox.

They were serious about it, too.

I wouldn't worry. I'm sure that both Russia and the US have some saved up...just in case.

There's a few people out there like that. Like giving sight or hearing back to people who lost it (especially at a young age). Martyrdom-by-proxy?

Mosquitoes rarely themselves kill humans. They are most of the time simply the vector of what kill humans. Actually, checking it, the Wikipedia article do state it clearly : "Mosquitoes do not kill humans directly. Rather, they are a vector that transmits mosquito-borne diseases".

You might consider "don’t shoot the messenger" should apply here too.

Hmmmm, let me try something...

Guns rarely themselves kill humans. They are most of the time simply the vector of what kill humans. Actually, checking it, the Wikipedia article do state it clearly : "Guns do not kill humans directly. Rather, they are a vector that transmits bullets".

Guns are the tools used to kill humans, yes. You will notice that guns don’t appear on the linked page, while humans do.

The coronavirus doesn't kill people, it's their own organs shutting down that kills them.

Honestly did you spend more than half a second thinking before you typed this reply? You don't need to be a "well ackchyually" pedant on the internet all the time.

> The coronavirus doesn't kill people, it's their own organs shutting down that kills them.

Viruses are not simple vector of a heal factor.

Put that back in topic please. That it is, should all mosquitoes be destroyed, based on the vague assumption that mosquitoes kill humans, without caring about the ecological impact of removing species which where there since longer than mankind?

Now, how does it compare with the will to eradicate a specific virus which wasn’t a mankind concern a few months ago?

>You don't need to be a "well ackchyually" pedant on the internet all the time.

Isn’t that the kind of sentence that is doing what it critics?

> Mosquitoes rarely themselves kill humans. They are most of the time simply the vector of what kill humans.

This is mental gymnastics. Mosquitoes kill humans.

It's not the assassin that kills, it's the knife /s

Would you say that mosquitoes are aiming at killing humans using viruses then?

But if you split by country, you'll see that there were 0 people killed by malaria in Europe and 500 in both Americas (2015).

Do you still think that we should kill all mosquitoes in the world?

https://ourworldindata.org/malaria

EDIT: haha, and the second most deadly animal from wiki list on earth is .... human. Should we get rid of these "pests" too? Could help with climate change also.

There are 0 people killed in Europe because we killed all malaria mosquitos with DDT and by draining swamps. Gene drive is a much more humane method in comparison.

Yes but suggestion of original poster was to kill all mosquitos without even mentioning anything about malaria. My comment was to point out that such blanket approach is terrifying.

Now that we digging in to details we see that when we look deeper in to problem we don't need to kill "all mosquitos" apparently.

I did not say we should kill them all. I just contested your camping statement.

Absolutely. ~10 species of mosquito vs the entire continent of Africa and all of the lives within it?

That’s not even an actual choice, it’s just “yes”. I choose humans.

The choice which you are eliding is: eliminate malaria by killing all mosquitos; or, eliminate malaria's harmful effects on humans by implementing existing prevention methods which do not require that.

We almost have a method that can work on almost any insect, https://www.nature.com/articles/nbt.4245 and we should definitely apply it to most mosquitos, and many agricultural pests especially in cases when it is an invasive species transported by us from continent to continent. Tzetze, kissing bugs, ticks also need to be eliminated though sadly we do not have a working method for ticks yet.

Was it wrong to (near) eliminate smallpox too?

"evolutionary" humanism would say so.

Mind you, the Nazis were followers of this branch of humanism so take from that what you will.

These sort of naturalist arguments seem to make little sense when thought about more clearly.

Of course that:

a) Destroying the environment is probably more destabilizing than keeping it intact... that's almost always the case with conservation vs change, conservation is the safe move

b) Destroying all insects (i.e a whopping 2/5th of all multi-celular bio diversity) would result in catastrophic damage... destroying 2/5th of all biodiversity would result in catastrophic damage.

The onus on any given insect conservation advocate is to prove:

1. Insects are more critical to the environment than other things we put more money and time into preserving (e.g Australia should spend more on preserving black widows and less on preserving koalas)

2. A very specific insect is critical and thus should be preserved at all cost, even if it means putting more money into the nature-preservation system

3. The bio-diversity of insects as a whole is dropping at an alarming rate compared to other species and this is harmful and unprecedented (biodiversity boom and bust cycles are the norm, usually)

I'm not saying the above 3 points can't be made.

But this article doesn't make them.

It sounds just like someone signaling "Hey, I'm a hippie ecologist, I love nature, even insects that sting, I'm that much of a group member, love me" rather than providing any new information or concrete policy proposal or even a meta-level argument for getting new information or creating new policy proposals.

The general idea of "we shouldn't destroy" nature has been around since, I assume, at least 5000 years ago or so, when bronze-age humans burnt down most forests in Europe and then realized this was bad and proceeded to replant and protect, or even venerate, forested areas. It's old new, nobody disagrees we should protect nature, it's just a typical tragedy of the commons problem, and one that hasn't been handled that badly thus far.

You should consider Chesterton's fence before either destroying something, or allowing it to be destroyed.

Chesterton's fence is the idea that you should understand a thing thoroughly, including its present function and what might change if it disappeared, before removing it. The hypothetical example being a fence in the middle of nowhere - seemingly useless, but you should really make sure before pulling it up as it may be serving a vital function to somebody else (or the system at large).

The point being, we're stumbling into an scenario where we've killed off the majority of animals in a major ecological category, which is likely to destabilise the environment in both known and unknown ways. If we value the environment's self-sustaining capabilities, this should be greatly concerning.

Government and engineering alike usually apply the precautionary principle - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precautionary_principle

Which says we need to use grave caution if we make changes with uncertain long-term effect.

"Maybe we can wipe out insects and everything will be just fine," is NOT what I want to base the future of humanity on.

I'm an older guy. In my lifetime, we've killed half the flying insects, half the wild mammals, half the aquatic mammals and in fact half the aquatic creatures bigger than my two fists put together.

And the devastation only continues to accelerate. And your response is just that we can't prove for sure that killing everything else off is bad for us.

https://xkcd.com/1338/

> Hey, I'm a hippie ecologist,

The appropriate response to your cynical screed would have me thrown off this site. For shame.

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