Isn't there a knock on effect of removing them?
Does anything eat them as food? Wouldn't it be environmentally damaging to remove a source of food for X?
Does anything eat them as food? Wouldn't it be environmentally damaging to remove a source of food for X?
Joking aside, the consensus seems to be that the effect of removing disease-carrying mosquitoes (not all mosquitoes) from the environment is minor compared to how many lives it can save.
In Europe though, where aedes aegypti didn't exist 20 years ago, it's probably the other way around: what did the introduction of this new species damage? (apart from making the summer unbearable outside if any of your neighbour isn't very strict with standing water elimination)
Is your level of knowledge on this just "there are other things called mosquitos ergo it's not a problem," or do you have deeper affirmative knowledge that the animals that eat these mosquitos also eat those other mosquitos, and that those other mosquitos can increase their population to replace the lost food source?
That's called risk.
Pointing out risk is not "fearmongering" lmao
Pointing out risk is a kind of fearmongering when it's technically real but too small to be worth worrying about. Asteroid impact is a real risk too.
I find analogies like this revealing (in the negative sense) of the level of thoughtfulness of bio-engineering advocates. Do you actually think this is an apt analogy? If so, you are not even remotely understanding the problem in front of us. If not, then are you just disingenuously deploying it and you’re unable to conjure up a more apt analogy?
In either case, it’s good evidence as to why I’m not comfortable accepting your prior stack of assumptions. The un-evidenced assumptions that come from a person who thinks asteroid strike risk is remotely similar to gene drives are frankly completely dismissible on their face.
In any case: Yes, you’re right that looking a lot and not finding anything does strengthen the argument there’s nothing to be found. How much? How much certainty do we need? Are there other cheap vectors by which to gain more certainty?
Acting like we have these answers and then saying “hopefully there no pollinators & it’s like an asteroid strike risk!” is seriously discrediting.
(And the asteroid strike thing was only an analogy for remote risk and the definition of fearmongering, not biotech in particular.)
An answer like "we should roll out limited tests and incrementally understand the impact" would be a good one.
"there are other things called mosquitos" is not a good one.
Deciding here, without sufficient evidence, whether I'm OK with eliminating aedes aegypti would be frankly bizarre and totally unnecessary.
Similar to the prior point: the fact that advocates try to advocate for the end state and not, you know, propose ways to de-risk incremental learning, is discrediting.
Luckily this is in progress and all we're likely to see for a bit. It's at least good to hear that it's possible to convince you.
Anyway, you're awfully concerned with "discrediting". I'm not pretending to have credit. I'm just a guy who tries to learn stuff in between surviving. But as long as we're on the topic, your consistently antagonistic reads of my comments don't do you any "credit" either.
Instead of responding "no, I do not know," you responded with an additional set of unfounded assumptions and then accused me of fearmongering for asking literally the most basic epistemological question there is: "do you know this, or are you assuming this?"
Throwing your lot in with "let's do irreversible extinctions of some species based on my zero expertise" doesn't really deserve a generous read, I'm afraid.
It's okay (in fact, desirable) to simply not come to a conclusion on questions where we don't have enough information yet.
> The idea that ecosystems carry plenty of backup, so if a small number of species become extinct there is little harm, has been greatly overestimated, according to the largest global study of its kind.
If it took a couple hundred years for this species to proliferate, it's absolutely plausible that eradicating it in a few years will have surprising second- and third-order effects.
Do you understand that time scales are important here?
There are also species that have invaded areas that are totally impossible for them to reach without seafaring or airfaring human civilizations to carry them.
All terms are made up. Some are useful and some are not. This one is useful.
Merely calling it invasive does not answer that question, ergo it is not a useful term in this conversation.
And yes, timescales do matter. A species can become critical to its new ("invaded") ecosystem within a few hundred years such that removing it within a few years will cause catastrophe.
Even in situations where they replace a native competitor, they can still be replaced themselves with that same native species once they’re gone.
A species evolving in Area A and migrating to Area B is extremely common.
Camels, horses, marsupials, elephants, cats, opossums, New World monkeys, and even Homo sapiens all evolved in regions different than where they are found now.
Once they’re integrated into their ecosystems we just don’t refer to them as invasive. But calling something invasive or not doesn’t affect their ecosystem integration, causality works in reverse.
So the relevant question is, again, whether these have become critical to their now-local ecosystems.
No, we've come to a point where you've moved the goalposts and refuse to support an assertion you made by answering a simple question.
> Camels, horses, marsupials, elephants, cats, opossums, New World monkeys, and even Homo sapiens all evolved in regions different than where they are found now.
All of this seems to stem from you not understanding what "invasive species" means, and, apparently, refusing to just Google it.
Invasive species have to be introduced by humans and harmful to the environment. Some of the things you listed fit that definition and some don't.
But regardless, you haven't given any evidence that eradicating those things from their new environment would harm that environment.
"Can you name an invasive species that was integrated successfully into its new environment?" No! Because we don't label those things invasive.
But again, the label does not change the environmental effects, the environmental effects change the label.
The question being asked, which you continue not to answer, is whether these particular species are integrated within their new environments or not. Simply saying that they are invasive and they've only been there for 400 years does not answer that question.
Sure: Asian elephants are broadly regarded as a keystone species in their environments today despite not being native to Asia.
A billion human lives, or some sad trout who have to eat fruit flies instead. For me, it’s an obvious choice.
I just can’t understand the level of smugness it must take to insist that we must force another billion people to die of horrible diseases like malaria, because you want the moral high ground. How do you even tell yourself that killing all those people is the moral high ground?
Yeah, it gets a bit silly real fast. I've never been accused for forcing a billion to die, so thanks for that.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_fatality_rate_in...
In fact, no, they did not say that. They said that the considered balance of the merits strongly favors eradicating the 2% of mosquito species that carry human diseases for someone who gives greater weight to the benefit of saving a billion human lives[0] than to the cost of some trout eating the thousands of other mosquito species instead.
[0] - 700 million contracted mosquito-borne illnesses each year worldwide. Death isn't the only consequence of significance.
If 20,000 humans weren't significantly harmed from disease because of this release, but 70,000 frogs faced starvation, which would you choose?
If we lose those frogs, it most likely would cause a cascade across other species. There are lots of things that eat frogs.
In the end, whose lives do you prioritize given the lack of information today, and the lives at risk today? Deciding to do nothing still costs lives, and potentially drives us further into the bad state area.
They're only applied to thing we don't want to do.
In reality, it's always true that we don't fully know, so applying the argument always means "let's not do this".
I don't get the "but what if it's somewhat - not infinitely - bad" argument? The known good is so dramatically good that we'd need a shocking amount of unknown bad to have made it not worth it. But if I'm choosing between mosquitoes, and say... fish, frogs, and a variety of birds, yes, get rid of the mosquitoes.
We start spraying crops so we can end world hunger (or just make more money) and screwing around with other things and now we're killing bees and other things. This will ultimately come to haunt us.
The death of all bees would count as infinitely bad (in terms of crop pollination) and we're doing a very good job in making that happen.
Others just downvoted me because they disagreed (which is not what you're supposed to do, afaik).
I don't even want to engage anymore as others just think I want a billion people to die to save some 'bad' mosquitos, which is obviously a ridiculous statement.