6 ms·

Aside from being carriers of disease, mosquitoes have been identified as fulfilling an insignificant biological niche. My knee jerk suspicion is that snakes are

• chasil 3y ago
  From a human vulnerability perspective, there is minimal human threat in North America's poisonous snakes, compared to the areas of India, China, Australia, and other nations in this area. Driving down the population for reasons of human risk seems reasonable there, by reversible means. With Florida's problem of invasive snakes, extreme removal efforts seem likewise warranted as non-native species should be completely removed from the local environment, especially considering their profound negative impact on biodiversity.
• wbillingsley 3y ago
  It depends. e.g. In Australia, the snake most people worry about (the eastern brown - world's second most venomous and common in cities) is native, so yes it's important to an ecosystem in the broader sense. But its numbers around cities have gone up because of mice, most of which are introduced, so it's a non-native part of the ecosystem that's pushing the numbers up. Doing something to bring the numbers back down around urban centres wouldn't seem like such a bad idea. Brown snakes aren't a threatened or endangered species and though cities are large human centres, they're not a large portion of the Australian geography. (And are largely artificially maintained ecosystems anyway - those houses and roads didn't appear naturally.) There are probably other ways for dealing with mice than having the world's second deadliest snake hanging around town.