Hacker News Reader

Comment by zamalek | Hacker News Reader

As I understand the situation with mosquito eradication, there are highly specific places where mosquitos are a critical source of biomass (I think the Arctic tundra was one example). In all other places they are completely and utterly worthless. Blood-eating (never mind species that are parasite vectors) are also a tiny percentage of the overall biodiversity, the nectar species could easily fill the gap.

View on HN

Female mosquitoes bite to produce eggs, male mosquitoes feed on nectar and pollinate plants. Some orchids can only be pollinated by mosquitoes.

So no one misunderstands, there are over 3000 species of mosquitos, but most biting species of mosquitos only go after birds/amphibians.

Only a small number of species (single digit percentage) go after mammals. And even less than have been found to be vectors for disease.

The basic point is that yes, we can wipe out selected mosquito species via eradication programs (like sterile mate release) with zero consequence outside of healthier people, because human hazardous mosquitos aren’t unique to the ecological niche they fill.

better than sterile male we could release fertile ones genetically modified to only have male offspring that in turn only have male offspring inside handful of generations there are no female mosquitos left.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10795774/

Oh that’s interesting, thanks.

Fair trade.

Mosquitos are an extremely important food source for countless animals especially aquatic species. The gap won't be filled. The animals that rely on them for food will just die off

The problem is that you might only find out they're important after you wipe them out, at which point it will be too late.

Will it be too late? We could move region by region and give a few years to see any changes. It's a two-way door that way.

I think collapsing the ecosystem of one region is already bad enough.

I mean that certainly sounds unequivocally true.

But "collapse" is not what I'm saying. If you were to remove mosquitos in a localized region and observe the effects on the region's ecology, you could witness the problems, reintroduce the bugs, and revitalize the region (probably it'd recover anyway).

Mosquitos are fairly localized. Their range upperbound is 7 miles. Some just fly 300 feet and breed around your house. There are plenty of ecological phenomena that are managed in "a few miles" ranges, like fish populations, forests, etc.

I haven't heard a compelling reason in any of these threads to believe that it's actually dangerous to remove them from a few sq mile area.

There's no reason to be absolutist about problems we can manage, just based on unobserved worst case solutions with no risk profile attached.

You're making arguments based on pure faith. There is no substance to anything you're saying.

I'm sure they thought they had everything figured out when they introduced the cane toad in Australia as well.

The point is that if an ecosystem needs to be "collapsed" to effect beneficial change for the humans living there in order to not die of illnesses, then so be it. Even referring to removing mosquitoes as "collapse" is not understanding the core argument, because not all collapse is bad and not all preservation is good; there is no value judgment in saying collapse but you are adding one there inherently.

If the foodchain collapses it's much worse for humans living there than malaria.

What part of the food chain is foundational on mosquitos? These are hypotheticals not rooted in any concrete argument.

I realize this is a dumb starting point, but ... Cows don't eat mosquitos, Feed corn is not pollinated by mosquitos, Orange groves do not require mosquitos. What, specifically, are we afraid of?

Sure, but it's unknown whether it will or not, that is what is being discussed.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com