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Comment by lukan | Hacker News Reader

Ticks are sometimes more annoying and way less ecological useful. (without mosquitos for example there would be way less birds, bats, ...)

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I’ve seen researchers suggesting that mosquitoes aren’t a big enough part of anything’s diet to be missed:

https://www.nature.com/articles/466432a

there's a large amount of endangered and critically important species for which the strongest reason the general public accepts for why we should accommodate them is "they eat X in mosquitos every night"

What are those species?

Probably tons of bats and small nocturnal mammals.

The serious proposals to eliminate mosquitoes only propose to eliminate the mosquito species that carry nasty human diseases. If those species were eliminated other mosquito species would quickly expand to replace the eliminated species.

So that's good for the birds, and bad for the humans that want to get rid of all the pesky annoying mosquitoes, not just get rid of mosquito born disease.

Although you can just make the disease carriers immune to the disease.

In that case, not even need to exterminate any species.

That's typically done by introducing some Wolbachia in their gut.

Yes, all the ectoparasites, look it up. We've eliminated most endoparasites that used to live inside us. If we figure out how to, we should eliminate the ectos, including mosquitos.

Lots and lots of delicious ground-dwelling birds eat ticks (Turkey, Chicken, Quail), but they'd figure something else out.

But not as their main source of food as far as I know. Bugs, worms and spiders are way bigger and more common.

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