4 ms·
Seems likely that ticks should go in the same category as mosquitoes -- how long until we use gene-drive tech to completely eradicate them?
by gcanyon 4mo ago
Seems likely that ticks should go in the same category as mosquitoes -- how long until we use gene-drive tech to completely eradicate them?
- ravetcofx 4mo agoAt what cost to the larger ecosystem. They are the base of a larger food web. Many creatures rely on eating them
- boxed 4mo agoWhat are you talking about? That's absolutely not the case for ticks. And for mosquitos it's often doubtful at best, and false when it comes to disease carrying species as there are plenty of other species available.
- microgpt 4mo ago[dead]
- olejorgenb 4mo agoThis wasp seems quite specialized towards ticks: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ixodiphagus_hookeri https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ixodiphagus_hookeri
- boxed 4mo agoSure. And those wasps maybe has other parasitic wasps, and those parasit wasps maybe have flees, who have bacterial diseases, who have viral diseases. All of them parasitic and all who would go extinct when that species goes extinct. But that's not what the previous poster was talking about. This is not the basis of a food web, that's just a parasitic cul de sac. And there are basically infinite such things in nature.
- wolvesechoes 4mo agoMany birds feed on ticks. Some beetles and amphibians as well.
- boxed 4mo ago"Will eat" and is the "base of a food web" are radically different things. Humans "will eat" pistachios, but the eradication of pistachios will do absolutely nothing to the human species.
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- WarmWash 4mo agoThey are part of the base of a large food web, not the base of a large food web.
- WhompingWindows 4mo agoDo you eat meat? Do you use a car and create carbon emissions? That's destroying ecosystems all around the world, and yet here we are doing nothing about it. Ticks aren't even the base of the pyramid, as others have stated, they're one of many choices for those creatures. Can you name a single creature who relies solely on disease-carrying ticks for food?
- mbac32768 4mo agoMy child almost died from a tick. Other children do die. I would gladly kill every tick on Earth and whatever relies on eating them so no human has to lose a kid to this again.
- sbayg 4mo agoBut we have AI now to guide us and it will help ensure we prevent most major ecological miscalculations. The context is different now, given the change in the cost of planning and research into ecological side effects, unlike anything we had in the past.
- abound 4mo agoAI is not a panacea. The interplay between different components in natural environments is impossibly complex and we basically always get this wrong. Modern LLMs might be able to surface some likely effects of altering a habitat, but it's also very dependent on humans having already studied it in some capacity, there could be new or subtle second-order (and beyond) effects that we just aren't aware of and AI doesn't have the raw data to infer correctly.