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Scientists: Go ahead, kill all the mosquitoes.
- wglb 16y agoI don't particularly like mosquitoes either. But I wonder, despite the claim of no downside, if there isn't some co-evolutionary relationship between mosquitoes and those that they draw blood from. Just wondering.
- code_duck 16y agoMosquitoes strike me as in interesting way in which nature turns mammal blood into food for birds.
- Qz 16y agoIf we kill the mosquitoes, and it leads to our downfall, then something will just evolve to fill our place since clearly we weren't well adapted enough...
- jbrennan 16y agoThat's my favourite part of being Human: we're pretty awesome at adaptation.
- tomjen3 16y agoI believe that is an understatement - we are properly the single best species at that.
- Qz 16y agoThat's a self-deceptive way of looking at evolution. Every species currently in existence is equally good at adaptation.
- tomjen3 16y agoNot really - only humans have been able to adapt from walking 7 miles an hour to flying faster than the speed of sound in less than 100 years.
- Qz 16y ago... and only humans have managed to kill off hundreds of millions of our kind in the same amount of time via war and genocide. The point is, evolution has only one measure for success: continued existence. Everything else is irrelevant.
- carnevalem 16y agoAnts have done the same. http://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/clvea/ants/c0thznv http://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/clvea/ants/c0thznv
- code_duck 16y agoNot the ones that are on their way out soon...
- brc 16y agoMy main fear was that removal of mosquitoes would give rise to another blood-sucking, biting insect to fill it's place. One that wasn't so slow, noisy and easy to repel with nets, repellant and clothing. A smaller, silent, insect would be far worse. Mosquitoes are the b52 bombers of the flying insect world - slow and easy to hit. I get bad reaction to sandflies. If sandflies replaced mosquitoes, my world would be severely negatively impacted.
- ithkuil 16y agoor Phlebotomus papatasi
- code_duck 16y agoThe large biting flies are a crazy phenomenon. They'll actually chase you, persistently. And they're HUGE. I was attacked by one a couple of years ago on Lake Michigan, and it just wouldn't leave me alone! I was diving, splashing it with water, running on the beach (it could fly about as fast as I could run) and no luck. I finally had to swat the vile beast.
- presidentender 16y agoColor me skeptical. The article is correct; other species would rise to fill the niche emptied by mosquitoes, and the world would achieve a stable equilibrium, but the same could be said for eliminating eagles or horseshoe crabs or wheat. Just because we'd be less itchy and never catch malaria doesn't mean our lives wouldn't be negatively impacted in unforeseen ways.
- nimai 16y agoWhy not extend that logic to malaria itself? Or cholera, HIV, or any other pathogen? Perhaps start selling "Save the plague!" bumper stickers?
- Qz 16y agoIf we exterminate the plague, how will we know when the end times are upon us?
- alanh 16y agoThe End Times are why True Believers are not only Pro-Life but also Pro-’liferation (of nukes). At least, according to that Maher movie, and the Left Behind series.
- Qz 16y agoDon't forget the christian organizations that pay to send Jews to Israel since that's also a pre-requisite for the End Times...
- ithkuil 16y agoas the Italian comedian Corrado Guzzanti pointed out, True Believers are not only Pro-Life but also Pro-After-Life http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hg5pSwsHni0 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hg5pSwsHni0
- presidentender 16y agoHell, for all we know, polio is the cure to HIV and HIV is the cure for cancer. I'm not saying "Oh god save the mosquitoes," I'm saying there could be negative impacts beyond the consideration of the scientists performing the study.
- JacobAldridge 16y agoHere's the actual Nature article - longer and with more detail - http://www.nature.com/news/2010/100721/full/466432a.html http://www.nature.com/news/2010/100721/full/466432a.html Edit: And a different take on the 'No' conclusion from the original link. Turns out 'Yes, in these situations, though maybe not and does that matter?' is the more accurate analysis of 3500 responses.
- jimmyjim 16y agoAnd the accompanying discussion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1538329 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1538329
- ams6110 16y agoConsidering that most of the species that have ever lived on Earth are now extinct, it is not surprising to discover that the demise of one more would not have any catastrophic consequences in the grand scheme of things. We were well on our way to getting rid of mosquitoes, incidentally, until we banned DDT. Millions of dead humans are the very real consequence of that decision.
- mortenjorck 16y agoIt's interesting to me just what a hot-button topic DDT continues to be. It seems that the moment it comes up in any discussion of something like bedbug proliferation, there's an outbreak of collective guilt about bald eagles and expressing anything outside this guilt quickly turns one into Tony Hayward. Not that I want to endanger bald eagles either, but I'd be interested to see a less politically-charged, more pragmatic debate on the potential advantages and disadvantages of reinstating its use in limited capacities.
- nimai 16y agoBald eagles aren't pathogens, or vectors for disease. They generally stay out of our way.
- AngryParsley 16y agoSure, but I value human lives much more than animal lives. Our best weapon against malaria causes collateral damage to eagles. It sucks for the eagles, but it's more important to prevent the deaths of millions of humans.
- sliverstorm 16y agoI think the debate would be much easier if we hadn't chosen them as our national symbol.
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- danbmil99 16y agobeware the law of unintended consequences. This warning will not be repeated
- kiba 16y agoWith so many species out there on planet earth, what's not to say that at least a few of them will go extinct? Life on earth doesn't stay still. Some will evolve, and some will go out extinct, and there will be a few mass extinction event there and there.
- sliverstorm 16y agoThe difficulty is while we are well aware of this law, we don't know if it will apply. Did the world miss polio when it was gone? Or the bubonic plague? There are always consequences of everything- hell, it's one of Newton's laws. But it's entirely possible there are no terrible awful consequences.
- _delirium 16y agoWell, we've mostly eradicated very human-specific diseases. Some do also infect other animals, but we've generally targeted very specific strains and species that are pathogenic to humans. We haven't completely eradicated an entire family of bacteria, or large class of viruses, which seems like it would be more comparable to eradicating all mosquitoes of every genus and species. It doesn't seem that hard to imagine unintended consequences if we eradicated not only the plague bacterium (probably Yersinia pestis), but the entire family Enterobacteriaceae, for example.
- kujawa 16y agoThis is the way the world ends. Because, who knows?, malaria just might be the thing that's keeping the zombie virus suppressed. But hell, who doesn't like a good a good genocide?
- jasonkester 16y agoDidn't they do that once already? I seem to remember that back in the days of DDT, mosquitos were killed back to the point where malaria was no longer a big deal. Then the 70's happened, DDT went away, mosquitos and malaria came back big time, and farmers in Southeast Asia started dying in large numbers because the insecticides they used to replace DDT were actually harmful right now instead of 'probably carcinogenic over 20 years'. Anybody know what the insecticide of choice is today, and whether it's as safe as (or safer than) DDT?
- metamemetics 16y agoOh man. The solution to the problem according to his last link http://intellectualventureslab.com/?page_id=563 http://intellectualventureslab.com/?page_id=563 is [scroll down...] LASERS.
- pigbucket 16y agoEngineering the extinction of this kind of hugely prolific and adaptive species looks to me like a mind-bogglingly hard problem, which the smart people linked to in the post are not directly working on (they're doing local control with superfancy lasers and possibly poisonous bait, so will probably only be offering sexy alternatives to mosquito nets and sprays). A possible approach would be to introduce mosquitoes that have a big competitive advantage over their peers initially but are ultimately (a few generations down) fucked, but to date I think humans have only figured out how to do that kind of thing with investment banks. (A hematologist friend once told me of another possible approach he thought might well work, but I was a bit drunk and he was speaking Greek, and in any case Gates said no.) A promising alternative that would render moot concerns about the eco-dangers of wiping out the mosquito would be to genetically engineer mosquitoes incapable of transmitting the parasite. That's apparently been done, but without the new safe mosquito having the survival advantage needed to dominate the species. See following, with footnote link to original paper: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/07/100715172002.htm http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/07/100715172002.ht...
- geedee77 16y agoThe thing that worries me, and the thing that I think no-one has mentioned (apologies if you have) is that when did we have the right to exterminate a whole species just because it makes our lives uncomfortable? I'm well aware that malaria and other diseases carried by mosquitoes are a very large killer in parts of the world but why aren't we trying to cure these diseases rather than wipe out a whole species? It just seems as if we, as a species, think we rule this planet so can do whatever we want with regard to the other species that exist on it.
- frobozz 16y ago"it's difficult to see what the downside would be to removal, except for collateral damage" Isn't collateral damage the entire problem with removing things from complex systems?