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Comment by AbrahamParangi | Hacker News Reader

I am not against this, but I will play devil's advocate on behalf of the mosquitos.

In 1958 the Four Pests Campaign called for the elimination of four pests, one of which was the sparrow. Sparrows were accused of consuming grain and as a result were targeted for elimination. A popular sparrow hunting campaign led to the near extinction of the Eurasian tree sparrow in China.

Shortly afterwards locust populations boomed, now missing one of their principle predators. The "smash sparrows campaign" is credited with worsening the Great Chinese Famine, which saw somewhere between 15 and 55 million people die.

The people who smashed sparrows believed it was correct just as surely as we believe anything today.

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This one species is not native to the Keys and is responsible for nearly all the mosquito-bourne illness there. If this kills every single mosquito of this species, 96% of the total mosquito population will remain.

> ...suppressing populations of wild Aedes aegypti mosquitoes, which can carry diseases such as Zika, dengue, chikungunya and yellow fever.

> Aedes aegypti makes up about 4% of the mosquito population in the Keys, a chain of tropical islands off the southern tip of Florida. But it is responsible for practically all mosquito-borne disease transmitted to humans in the region

On the other hand, consider that the screwworm barrier has been a huge success: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/article/north-ame...

And the story continues. The insect pest was countered with widespread pesticide use, eventually nearly extinguishing the bee population in large parts of China. So, today, masses of people walk around hand-pollinating fruit trees.

It's a disaster. Like always when humans intervene in key larts of the ecosystem and totally screw up the network effects.

Another story showing the vast effects of such interventions is the story of the wolf in Yellowstone.

It is often forgotten that while we are a large interference, nature is in no way a stranger to random changes, all the way up to mass extinction events. On smaller scales, it isn't unusual for species to introduce themselves to new lands by crossing waters and making a complete mess of the local ecosystem.

"Nature" is nothing but the fragile status quo of a system in constant flux.

Sure, but random change is different from what we do. That's not random, it's deliberate and usually ends up in a disaster.

Natures status quo tends to be quite robust absent discontinuous changes. If one season there was a bit less rain, population sizes adjust and everything keeps working. A bit warmer, a bit windier, etc, continuous effects are dealt with in some robust manner.

Only when there are discontinuous changes then dramatic things happening. A meteor impact is such an event, some island gets reachable and suddenly flooded by some species, this kind of thing. But in nature such events are rare. Humans introduce such event all the time. Instead of an island getting reachable, we drive between them with boats or bring animals as pets or plant some nice flower from a different continent that gets invasive. Or modify genes or burn up millions of tons of coal.

We humans introduce those events at a massive scale, which is an entirely different quality than random changes in nature.

> Sure, but random change is different from what we do. That's not random, it's deliberate and usually ends up in a disaster.

The selfish human decision to eradicate nuisances is just as random as the selfish decision of a predator to find new lands and drive local animals to extinction.

Most of our our eradication is not intentional, usually just hunting or eating a species out of existence. We are just dumb predators doing what successful predators do.

> We humans introduce those events at a massive scale, which is an entirely different quality than random changes in nature.

In the face of ice ages, our eradication attempts are no more impressive than a child killing ants in their backyard. The only thing in this regard that is truly impressive is our delusions of grandeur.

Granted, we gain little from messing with nature, but our attempts to maintain the status quo is guaranteed to fail. Nature is the furthest from a constant as one could possibly get, and species and ecosystem are ephemeral at best.

The estimates are fluctuating, but a rough consensus is that we have driven in the order of 1 million species to extinction already. That's closer to an ice age than to a child killing ants in their backyard.

We don't just do this the way other predators do, by killing them to eat them. No, most of them are "mistakes" because we don't care.

> but a rough consensus is that we have driven in the order of 1 million species to extinction already

[citation needed] - and for that matter, an estimate for eradication caused by other species for comparison.

(A good counter here would ask me the same for ice age extinction counts.)

> We don't just do this the way other predators do, by killing them to eat them.

Predators kill for food, fun and frustration.

Any outdoor cat owner would be able to tell you that predators don't kill to eat, as they clean up the daily lot of dismembered birds and rodents in their garden.

> No, most of them are "mistakes" because we don't care.

You think not caring about what we kill is a unique property to us?

>Sure, but random change is different from what we do. That's not random, it's deliberate and usually ends up in a disaster.

We were randomly created though, right?

That's the "humans are part of nature, so everything we do is natural" defense. With that angle, this whole discussion is meaningless.

It is a fragile balance but overall is a rather robust solution.

It is not in balance - our lifespans are just too short to count as more than a point measurement in the timescales that nature operates on.

The counterargument to this is that Aedes aegypti form a small proportion of the mosquito population and ecological niche in general.

The larger concern is that mosquitoes bred by the same company are reaching adulthood and breeding new generations in greater numbers than projected[1][2]

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26929775

[2] https://gizmodo.com/genetically-modified-mosquitoes-are-bree...

Many "ecological niches" end up being key to the whole ecosystem. Mess them up and the whole ecosystem is messed up. The system is so complex that it's hard to know beforehand.

Aedes aegypti is an invasive species in that area. It is not a normal part of the ecology. Even now it is only about 4% of the mosquito population. Removing it would not impact other creatures that prey on mosquitos in general.

We should save some of the mosquitoes in labs in case there are unintended consequences. Then if needed, they can be bred and brought back to the environment.

The world has no shortage of Aedes aegypti. The intent here isn't to annihilate the species worldwide, but to eradicate it from a specific region in which it is harmfully invasive.

The strategy at hand is self-destructing by nature. Per evolution basic theory, the gene most adapted to the environment and which produces more offsprings, survives.

Therefore, offsprings of unmodified mosquitos have twice the chance to reproduce, as both males and females can reproduce and both will yield unmodified males and females. I wouldn't know the rate, but even if slowly, unmodified strain will come back, unless it is overwhelmed first. In which case both are extinct and unmodified can come back imported from other countries.

There need be no female preference for this to happen, but of course if they evolve to detect modified males it would accelerate the rate which modified mosquitos get extinct. So, even if there damage from the experiment to the ecosystem, it would self heal in this case. (and apparently no major side-effect happened in Brazil)

Edit: my understanding, I'm not even from this area

I remember a story about wolves at Yellowstone ending in similar systemic failure.

Hopefully people doing large scale interventions have better models than 'wiping <species>'.

Wolves = the only species of wolves in Yellowstone. Eliminating wolves (a native species) eliminates 100% of the wolves in Yellowstone. A key part of the food chain is removed.

aedes aegypti = 4% of the mosquitoes in this region. Eliminating aedes aegypti (an introduced, invasive species) eliminates 4% of the mosquitoes in the region. The food chain still has 96% of the mosquitoes available.

There is just a difference in those two things.

Ok, no need to nitpick, also they didn't remove wolves, they reduced the population, but the issues came anyways.

The nit picked here is that your anecdote was about removing all wolves from an area whereas the mosquito discussion is about removing one mosquito species of many when that species is non-native and only comprises 4% of the overall population. The potential for issues is massively different.

There are other mosquito population controls already in place though. Compared to dumping poison from planes I think this more targeted approach is an improvement.

maybe GM is the "Great Filter" ...

> The people who smashed sparrows believed it was correct just as surely as we believe anything today.

So were the people who thought the earth was flat.

>but this time it's different...

>Aedes aegypti this, Aedes aegypti that...

To those with these kinds of rebuttals to the parent, please understand: absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Unknown unknowns lie ahead, and you cannot predict the outcome with even a modicum of certainty.

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