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Comment by teruakohatu | Hacker News Reader

Not all mosquito spread disease or bite humans and the ones that do are not a major part of important ecosystems. When DEET was used heavily it didn't collapse any ecosystems. If we eliminate those species, the non-spreaders will fill the niche while eliminating major human suffering. It is not comparable to killing any sparrow sized bird.

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As far as we know. My argument is that large chaotic systems are often poorly understood by us and we have gotten it wrong many times in the past.

I agree that erradicating bad mosquitos feels like a win, but I personally don’t know if there’s any unforeseen effects.

Your argument lacks nuance. It comes across as though you are unwilling to accept that we can learn from the mistakes of the past and be more careful this time, because with that attitude you don't have to engage with the specifics of a proposal. It really seems like pointless fearmongering, especially after the article already addressed some of the specific concerns about what might go wrong with introducing GMO chestnuts into the wild. Reminding people of the general concern that making significant changes to a whole ecosystem can have unforeseen consequences doesn't add anything to that conversation.

Ha. He learned from the past that some things are better to not mess with.

If you fail at something 1000 times at some point humility should force you to reconsider trying.

If something is worth doing it's worth doing. I'm glad for example the people trying to cure various diseases don't have the characteristic that you call humility but I reckon is something else entirely.

Risk vs. reward

Never risk the thing you can’t afford to lose to gain something you don’t need.

Different when it comes to life ending sickness.

Now you're talking about something completely different than what you were talking about initially.

My reply was to the comment I quoted, not the introduction of GMO chestnuts. We have had great success at introducing gmo crops very successfully.

We have more often caused harm than good when eradicating entire sections of ecosystems. From what I’ve read at least.

We could maintain a few populations in labs and/or isolated areas. Inspects repopulate hella fast, so it’d be easy enough to undo such a project if we found that they were a lynchpin of some kind.

Importantly, the mosquito that is the major spreader of malaria is an invasive species in most of the world. So wiping out that species is actually correcting the ecosystem. Win-win.

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