Comment by pvaldes | Hacker News Reader

Comment by pvaldes | Hacker News Reader

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Repeating the same mistake as Mao. We will never learn.

> They may be playing some unknown role in some unknown ecosystem, which no scientist or researcher said is necessary

Let me fix this for you real quick. They ARE playing a MAIN role in MANY KNOWN ecosystems and EVERY Biologist know this and SAID this for AGES.

Denying Ecology, a branch of the science called Biology, is like denying Physics or claiming that nobody understand Maths. If we want to have an adult conversation we should stop repeating "nah nah nah, I can't hear you".

Biologists aren't stupid, just annoying. We painfully studied, classified, and tortured other humans with the description of each little bug and each little blade grass, since the period of the painted caves at least. We may miss that a penguin species are two identical penguin species, but we would not miss a species that canalize so much energy through the system as mosquitoes do. This is one of the most researched species in the history and its role in ecosystems is REAL and has been proven.

Can we, please, just accept the truth and move on with this conversation?

We do know that mosquitoes are a key species, and we have witnessed many times in human history that ecosystems will predictably collapse in unpredictable ways when a key species vanish. We know that a different animal will quickly fill the vacuum with UNPREDICTABLE, UNFIXABLE, and PERMANENT consequences

Remember when a small cute furry animal from Asian steppes invaded the planet and killed people left and right? Remember how much money we must burn today because rats?.

Mao tried the same, promoted new plagues, and millions of Chinese died of famine for it. How many people would starve if freshwater fisheries vanish overnight?. Even worse, what if the animal replacing mosquitoes connect us with new diseases that our bodies never evolved to fight, exactly as rats did?.

We should apply an electrified and double barbed wired Chesterton's Fence here, because messing with ecosystems at this scale is reckless. This ranks among the same grade as nuclear stuff.

This isn't some big unknown experiment played out globally with no way of going back. Aedes aegypti has been successfully eliminated in a number of countries over a long time span. No country to date has ever reported unplanned consequences from eliminating Aedes aegypti. Guess what, if there are consequences, Aedes aegypti can easily be reintroduced into the local ecology. Mosquitos it turns out breed voraciously especially when encouraged.

> We do know that mosquitoes are a key species, and we have witnessed many times in human history that ecosystems will predictably collapse in unpredictable ways when a key species vanish. We know that a different animal will quickly fill the vacuum with UNPREDICTABLE, UNFIXABLE, and PERMANENT consequences

There are over 3600 species of mosquito.[1] "Amongst these, only 3 very closely related species are responsible for most malaria transmission: Anopheles gambiae , Anopheles coluzzii and Anopheles arabiensis."[2]

We can target these: freeze a whole bunch of samples as a 'backup' in case they need to be re-introduced, eliminate these three, and then see what happens. If nothing "bad" happens to the ecology after a few decades: great; if there are ecological problems we can bring them back from the samples that were preserved.

A similar system can be done for the diseases of Dengue, Zika, chikungunya, yellow fever, and Rift Valley fever (Aedes aegypti (yellow fever mosquito) and Aedes albopictus (Asian tiger mosquito)).

That's 5 out of 3600.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mosquito

[2] https://targetmalaria.org/about-us/our-approach/

> We can target these: freeze a whole bunch of samples as a 'backup' in case they need to be re-introduced, eliminate these three, and then see what happens.

Not, we can't, because ecological models predict that your simple solution will not work (and many past experiences had confirmed the same outcome).

The change will be permanent, and unfixable.

We can't remove rabbits from Australia. We can't recover cod fisheries collapsed in the Gulf of Maine. Both are key species. Either it will never happen or it will happen so slow that at practical effects is the same as not happening. We would need a new collapse of the ecosystem for that.

When half of the people who have lived stopped living because of a mosquito I think we are firmly in the 'give it a shot and see what happens' territory. As long as you don't kill half the population it was a success.

> Mosquito-borne malaria has killed half of the humans ever born

I can't see anywhere the cite(s) proving this fantabulous claim. Without that, we can assume that it came out of thin air for dramatic effect.

Mosquitoes kill a lot of people, but not "half of the humanity". One on each two persons that you know in your city are killed by mosquitoes? Seriously? Why are we still focused on car crashes and heart strokes?

Of the people killed by malaria, 95% are Africans. One of each two people in Africa are killed by malaria?. World Health Organization says that in 2024 there was 282 million cases of malaria and of those, more than 281 millions survived [1]. This is not a fifty percent of mortality in my book.

Malaria mortality is a 2% in the worse locations, 0.5-1% in most of Africa and lower in India or China.

https://www.who.int/teams/global-malaria-programme/reports/w...

I'm pretty sure that stat would be talking about people long dead.

But you forget that a huge majority of the humans that once lived were born in the last century.

We were less than 0.2 billions in 200 AC, one billion in 1804, two in 1927 and we are 8.3 billions now.

For most of the 8 millions of years walking on this planet we were like "a couple thousands of people" or so, just a blip in the entire history. The impact of this long dead people on statistics comprising our whole species would be negligible, or really low at best.

Timothy Winegard - The Mosquito: A Human History of Our Deadliest Predator.

Pro tip: there have been a lot of people before the current ones.

I bet that he sold a lot of books with such claims

A brief look over at goodreads paints this book as mostly military history.

Other people in this thread are asking for actual scientific papers and articles. Not some guys military history book with the mosquito shoved in.

“The mosquito has killed more people than any other cause of death in human history. Statistical extrapolation situates mosquito-inflicted deaths approaching half of all humans that have ever lived.”

So once again its just some bull shit.

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