11 ms·

A world without mosquitoes (2010)

92 points by denzil_correa 12y ago

EGreg 12y ago
I think Bill Gates has been trumpeting this as well. It wouldn't be the first species driven to extinction by human activity. How about it friends? In other news, pubic lice are already an endangered species: http://www.cbsnews.com/news/brazilian-bikini-wax-making-crab-lice-endangered/ http://www.cbsnews.com/news/brazilian-bikini-wax-making-crab...
dmritard96 12y ago
As someone that grew up in South Florida, spending lots of time in the Everglades and Keys (shit tons of mosquitoes...), I find the whole thing pretty scary. As an occasional fly fisherman that uses mosquito fly's I find the idea scary. Mosquitoes present problems for humans, but this general idea of lets wipe out species to make life easier for humans seems shortsighted, at best.
- aaronem 12y ago
  It's not really a new idea. Seen any homo neanderthalensis around lately?
  - Thrymr 12y ago
    That was not really an "idea", but the result of collective actions. This is to previous extinctions [1] as premeditated murder is to negligent homicide. [1] with the possible exception of smallpox
  - krick 12y ago
    Well, I don't really think that killing all the neanderthals was conscious action. Of course I haven't been there and cannot know for sure, but it seems to me to be more likely a natural competition, when one species eventually loses and dies out, not a genocide. And idea of killing all the mosquitos (I don't argue if it's good or bad) definitely is a genocide. So it's better to compare it to the idea of eliminating all the jews during WWII (however it also isn't perfect comparison, because jews aren't really a different species). But the spirit of it is really the same.
    - pavel_lishin 12y ago
      > So it's better to compare it to the idea of eliminating all the jews during WWII (however it also isn't perfect comparison, because jews aren't really a different species). I've also never been bitten by anyone of Jewish descent, and while they're as susceptible to infection disease as any other human, they don't carry a disease that kills hundreds of thousands of people per year. So maybe this is kind of a silly comparison altogether.
    - jamesaguilar 12y ago
      That is probably the weakest Godwin-ing of a thread I've ever seen. Eliminating an unthinking species for good reasons is no no way morally equivalent to massacring an ethnicity for no particular reason.
      - krick 12y ago
        You see, people who wanted to kill all the jews or whatever you may think of as "evil" did so not because they are "evil". They didn't think "oh, I come up with such a horrible idea, cannot wait to put it into action!". They had perfectly fine reasons why they think it is worth doing so. And surely they didn't think of the creatures they want to destroy (jews, in case of the holocaust) as of their equals. As well as you have perfectly fine reasons to want to kill all the mosquitos and don't think of them as your equals. While saying it I don't honestly expect for you to understand that, because double standards are such a common thing today, especially for western people, but I find it both sad and funny that you are really thinking what you are saying. As do many others like you. At this point it might be expected for someone to point out that the same reasoning could be applied to, say, parasitic flatworms. Well, yeah. (Actually, I see the difference here, because when dealing with cestoidae we don't care about eliminating them totally, only about preventing them to get inside of you, your cow, etc. But that isn't the point.) That's why I'm not trying to argue if the idea of killing all the mosquitos is good or bad. (And if you are curious, I think it's bad idea, for purely ecological, and not some moral reasons, but, again, it's not the point.) But I'm feeling uncomfortable to the point of being irritated by hypocrisy of those who are implying that eliminating the whole species for the single reason of it making their own lives more comfortable has less moral complications than, say, holocaust. Because it doesn't. And, yeah, I find equally disgusting the way you try to use word "unthinking" as an excuse. "Thinking" is label you give to some chemical process in your brain. The life of mosquito is some chemical process as well, whether you chose to label his behavior as "thinking" or not. Technically speaking, there's no fundamental difference between you and mosquito. We may agree that level of complexity in mosquito's behavior doesn't deserve the glorious name of "thinking", but surely you can judge by mosquito's behavior that she isn't trying (I'm avoiding words like "wants" or "thinks" for purpose) to die. And of course for mosquito your life isn't of more value than her own. More than that: there's no real reason why your life should be more valuable than one of mosquito for some other human, especially if you are completely unrelated. So, ideally, by writing this I would want to make somebody to feel conscious of the fact that killing the mosquito is killing and killing out the whole species is genocide, whith all moral and biological implications of that. But, as I said already, I don't really believe I will. And the last thing: what I mean by saying "ecological reasons" or "biological implications" is that bringing cane toads to Australia also should've sounded as safe and really very cool and maybe even somewhat futuristic idea back then. I hope that everybody daring to participate in discussions about ecology and whatsoever knows how it turned out. And few dozen of similar stories as well. I don't really believe that we can be significantly more confident in our reasoning about such complicated matters today, with all our fancy theories and computing devices.
beloch 12y ago
Wiping out a species deliberately flies in the face of the philosophy of environmental conservation that we all learned in school and from media. However, we have wiped out organisms that threaten humans before (e.g. smallpox) and are currently in the process of wiping out others, such as polio and the guinea worm, which is a parasite that is ingested in contaminated water only to emerge, slowly and painfully, through the skin (see Dracunculiasis). In terms of deaths caused, mosquitoes are undoubtedly far deadlier than any species humans have eradicated to date. In North America they are more of a nuisance than a deadly threat, but the same does not hold true for large portions of the world where they are a major disease vector. They are unquestionably worth eradicating if it ever becomes feasible to do so. The question should not be whether or not we should eliminate the species of mosquitoes that feed on humans. Instead, we should ask how can we minimize the impact of eliminating these species. Can other species of mosquitoes that are not disease vectors, or other insects entirely, fill in the vacated niche? Is it possible to eradicate mosquitoes in test areas to see what the long-term impact is? If we do eradicate them globally, how long would we have to "hit reset" by hatching and releasing stored eggs if unforeseen consequences make it necessary?
- hayksaakian 12y ago
  Alternatively, can we nudge evolution in a desirable direction so that the disease spreading capabilities of modern mosquito's are surpassed by a new species that serves the same ecological role without spreading disease?
  - aestra 12y ago
    Impossible. Even if we could nobody knows the full extent of the ecological role of mosquitos. When you are talking about ecology there are too many variables to know them all.
    - JoeAltmaier 12y ago
      Nature lost species all the time throughout history, and the world survived. I'd say, there are so many variables that the ecosystem can surely adapt to the loss of any particular species.
jimmcslim 12y ago
I highly recommend this Radiolab episode, "KILL 'EM ALL", which explores the same issue. http://www.radiolab.org/story/kill-em-all/ http://www.radiolab.org/story/kill-em-all/
sramsay 12y ago
Taken as a whole, the article says, "We don't really know what would happen." And while absolute certainty seems unlikely in an area as complex as ecology, it also seems foolhardy at best to act on the kind of (understandably) flimsy knowledge we now possess.
ianbicking 12y ago
Inspired by this article, and getting bitten by mosquitoes since then, and some of the more interesting species-targeting work being done, I've been thinking about this topic. There is a very major positive impact that mosquito elimination would have: we'd stop trying to suppress mosquitoes. We'd stop spraying for mosquitoes. We'd be more lax about standing water. Standing water is treated like something awful, and while it can get a bit smelly and obnoxious, that's because standing water is an interesting host for lots of life, and besides mosquitoes that life is mostly fine. Add in tick elimination and we could let many more urban areas go fully wild. More people would spend more time outside, and I think that would itself be a major ecological factor, as it would positively affect our attitude about the outdoors. There's a couple obnoxious insects, but nothing compares to the mosquito. Eliminate mosquitoes and suddenly the human race can come to peace with bugs. That would be hugely ecologically positive.
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  - ianbicking 12y ago
    I thought about adding the qualifier "outdoor bugs" – indoor bugs are often problematic, but their elimination or suppression doesn't have much affect on the natural ecology.
  - pavel_lishin 12y ago
    I live in New York. I care about bedbugs, sure, but mosquitos seem to find me all the time. Of course, it doesn't help that we had our own backyard with a pool in it - chlorinated, sure, but I guess those suckers are sturdy.
  - reustle 12y ago
    Apparently it is my blood type or something, but I am constantly getting eaten alive by mosquitos. I grew up in rural Pennsylvania where they are common, so it was really annoying.
omilu 12y ago
I assume a lot of other animals rely on mosquitoes for food, for example fish and spiders. What would these guys eat when we eliminate mosquitoes.
- seanflyon 12y ago
  Other small flying insects.
frogpelt 12y ago
Okay, so it might be a good thing if we rid the world of mosquitoes. Could we even do that? How?
- Lord_Zero 12y ago
  A good start would be some injection or orally taken medication that causes mosquitoes to die after they feed on us.
- DanBC 12y ago
  There are limited mosquito species that carry malaria, and only the females bite humans. Those insects have specific wing-beat frequencies and a limited range of sizes. So it's possible to build "photonic fences" - sets of detectors to detect those specific mosquitos and then shoot them with a laser. http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mosquito_laser http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mosquito_laser If you make these cheap enough amd deploy them widely enough you'd cut down on the problem populations.
  - martey 12y ago
    Since the "photonic fence" was developed by known patent troll Intellectual Ventures in 2009 and does not seem to have been ever deployed outside of their labs, the cynic in me thinks that it was only created to boost their PR efforts (there were dozens of articles at the time about how the laser system would eliminate malaria) and possibly increase their patent portfolio. https://www.google.com/patents/US20100186284 https://www.google.com/patents/US20100186284 http://www.malariaworld.org/blog/will-laser-technology-rid-africa-malaria http://www.malariaworld.org/blog/will-laser-technology-rid-a... https://www.techdirt.com/blog/innovation/articles/20120903/07334520256/forget-death-star-anti-mosquito-lasers-heres-how-nathan-myhrvold-can-help-tackle-malaria-improve-his-image.shtml https://www.techdirt.com/blog/innovation/articles/20120903/0...
- ianbicking 12y ago
  There's some good work being done: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sterile_insect_technique https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sterile_insect_technique – the current trials happening work by genetically engineer mosquitoes so they can't produce a certain protein that is important at the larval stage. They raise a bunch of mosquitoes, giving them the necessary protein (that they can't find in the wild), then sort out only the male mosquitoes, and release them in large numbers. The GM male mosquitoes overwhelm the normal mosquitoes in the area, but all their offspring will die. Seems like the big trials are all happening in Brazil (e.g., http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn25457-brazil-approves-use-of-genetically-modified-mosquitoes.html http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn25457-brazil-approves-...) It's done on a per-species basis of course, and they are targeting only the mosquitoes that spread disease. The worst species are often invasive species anyway, and aren't the only blood-sucking mosquito in these areas. So while it's a tool that could potentially be used to eliminate mosquitoes generally, that's not how it is being used now.
Cogito 12y ago
A few comments discuss the complete eradication of all mosquitoes, and the impact that would have. It is worth noting that only a few of the various mosquito species are vectors for most of the diseases we tend to care about, and as such the complete eradication of all mosquitoes is not necessary. You can eradicate just those species in order to remove the disease vectors, and replace them at the same time with a different mosquito that has a similar ecological role. Of course we don't actually know if disease-vector mosquitoes play a different role than non-disease-vector mosquitoes, but the premise need not be the removal of all mosquitoes.
guard-of-terra 12y ago
Can't we kill off mosquitoes and then release ones who can't drink blood? I guess they'll still reproduce, albeit slower.
trhway 12y ago
>Yet in many cases, scientists acknowledge that the ecological scar left by a missing mosquito would heal quickly as the niche was filled by other organisms. yeaaa... i can't wait to learn who will replace those mosquitos in the "human bloodsucker and malaria<or whatever else> spreader" niche. I'm sure it will be very polite and tender creation doing it quickly and painlessly ...
ck2 12y ago
How would we ever recreate dinosaurs without mosquitoes trapped in amber? But seriously, where do I donate to the irradiation of mosquitoes? I suspect it is not just a matter of money or Bill Gates foundation would be working on that (other than their genetic modification experiments).
- cbd1984 12y ago
  > the irradiation of mosquitoes Eradication. Irradiated mosquitoes would just make our problems worse.
hyp0 12y ago
Most of civilization's advances address problems created by civilization, especially density and diet. Eliminating the harmful mosquitoes will surely create some additional problems - but we'll deal with just as we have all the other problems we create.
MattWard 12y ago
hard to think there couldn't be negatives to this...some thing s we don't totally understand yet would harm anything that eats them, possibly reducing diseases would lead to over population of certain species as well
Jedd 12y ago
Since the goal is to rid ourselves of malaria, are there more sophisticated ways to do this that don't involve permanently eradicating some or all species of mosquitoes? I'm sure I read, perhaps mid 1990's in a New Scientist article, a proposition along the lines of: 1. obtain a good sampling of a/some mosquito species - keep them in a sealed greenhouse somewhere, ensuring they have access to clean blood (ie. no pathogens we care about) 2. eradicate them in the wild - at the time the expectation was a 'terminator' style gene that, once introduced into populations would, after say a dozen or so generations, lead to an exclusively infertile population, resulting in extinction 3. release the pathogen-free mosquitoes back into the environment - presumably after ensuring pathogens were no longer in the population, which I suppose means at least one generation of hosts - so it could be some decades. The idea was appealing because it means if we missed something fundamental during phase 2, it'd be possible to re-populate quickly, it could be repeated periodically if needed, and it could be performed on regional levels with good effect, especially if you toned down your expectations to 'drastically reducing prevalence of pathogens' rather than 100% eradication.
- lxmorj 12y ago
  Backup the species before deleting them in case there is an unforeseen dependency? Pretty clever failsafe, actually!
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winter_blue 12y ago
I think that, if we can, we should completely and entirely get the world rid of mosquitoes (and tsetse flies as well if possible). Several species have become extinct in the world's history -- in fact far more species have gone extinct than extant today. Diminishing mosquitoes to EW (Extinct in the Wild) status would save millions of human lives. Malaria isn't the only disease spread by mosquito. Mosquitoes are responsible for transmitting several diseases. The "aedes aegypti" species of mosquito doesn't spread malaria, but several other debilitating diseases including dengue fever, chikungunya, yellow fever, etc.
lovemenot 12y ago
A little disappointed that neither the article nor comments have made much of the argument that any species which has made it through billions of years of evolution is intrinsically a thing of value. As for planned extinction, I feel the bar should be set high: we needn't know, right now, what their long-term value must be. Nevertheless, if I try to find some specific value to mosquitoes, it is likely related to the thing that also makes them pernicious. They are evasive, clever, micro-scale hunters some of which have co-evolved with humans for millions of years. Their feeding indicates they might be used for drug delivery, weapons, communications, logistics. Just from one person's point of view, it would be a shame if, ten years after total eradication, Moore's Law delivered a boat-load of potential applications for mosquitoes. And of course if these insects have a say in the matter, we know how they'd likely vote.
- baddox 12y ago
  > A little disappointed that neither the article nor comments have made much of the argument that any species which has made it through billions of years of evolution is intrinsically a thing of value. When you dabble in evolutionary determinism, you run into problems, because humans seem to have free will but also seem to be the result of evolution. So when it comes to decisions by humans, it's hard to say which choice is "interfering" with evolution. I would say that, by definition, no human action is interfering with evolution, assuming that humans are the result of evolution. If we do decide to eliminate mosquitoes, well, that just means humans evolved to eliminate mosquitoes, and mosquitoes didn't evolve to survive such attempts.
JDDunn9 12y ago
Killing off all the mosquitoes is pretty challenging. Mosquitoes have a short flight ranges, from 300ft to 3 miles. So whatever method you use has to cover every mile of land. They are attracted to CO2, which makes it difficult to make a trap that is any more effective at attracting them than every other person around. Bats can eat a lot of mosquitoes, but they also eat a lot of other insects too, which would have side-effects.
kristiandupont 12y ago
When the world started switching to LED-based traffic lights, cold places suddenly discovered that there was a problem: they would get covered in snow. Turns out that the old incandescent ones had a solution to this problem in giving off heat. As trivial as it is once you think about it, it was a problem that we didn't even realize we had solved. I always use this as an example of how bad we are at predicting the outcome of our actions. It's why small iterations make so much sense. For running your company and for anything. Eradicating mosquitoes might seem harmless in any way we can think of (even though the article gives good examples of why it probably isn't), but even so, such a massive change in the eco-system is bound to have a bunch of really severe consequences that we hadn't foreseen.
blaze33 12y ago
Reminds me of the 4 pests campaign in China, 1958 [1]. "By April 1960, Chinese leaders realized that sparrows ate a large amount of insects, as well as grains. Rather than being increased, rice yields after the campaign were substantially decreased." [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Pests_Campaign http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Pests_Campaign Not related, a 2011 study (edit: this in fact credited in the article) found out that eradicating mosquitoes in the french Camargue led to house martins having trouble finding food and correctly feeding their offspring. [2] [2] http://www.tourduvalat.org/fr/actualites/indirect_effects_bioinsecticides_non_target_fauna_camargue_experiments_calls_future http://www.tourduvalat.org/fr/actualites/indirect_effects_bi... Original study: POULIN B., 2012. Indirect effects of bioinsecticides on the non target fauna: the Camargue experiments calls for future research. Acta Oecol 44 p28-32. Appears we're not that good at predicting outcomes in complex systems.
simonebrunozzi 12y ago
What's the best mosquito repellent?

92 points by denzil_correa 12y ago

EGreg 12y ago

I think Bill Gates has been trumpeting this as well. It wouldn't be the first species driven to extinction by human activity. How about it friends? In other news, pubic lice are already an endangered species: http://www.cbsnews.com/news/brazilian-bikini-wax-making-crab-lice-endangered/ http://www.cbsnews.com/news/brazilian-bikini-wax-making-crab...

dmritard96 12y ago

As someone that grew up in South Florida, spending lots of time in the Everglades and Keys (shit tons of mosquitoes...), I find the whole thing pretty scary. As an occasional fly fisherman that uses mosquito fly's I find the idea scary. Mosquitoes present problems for humans, but this general idea of lets wipe out species to make life easier for humans seems shortsighted, at best.

aaronem 12y ago
It's not really a new idea. Seen any homo neanderthalensis around lately?
- Thrymr 12y ago
  That was not really an "idea", but the result of collective actions. This is to previous extinctions [1] as premeditated murder is to negligent homicide. [1] with the possible exception of smallpox
- krick 12y ago
  Well, I don't really think that killing all the neanderthals was conscious action. Of course I haven't been there and cannot know for sure, but it seems to me to be more likely a natural competition, when one species eventually loses and dies out, not a genocide. And idea of killing all the mosquitos (I don't argue if it's good or bad) definitely is a genocide. So it's better to compare it to the idea of eliminating all the jews during WWII (however it also isn't perfect comparison, because jews aren't really a different species). But the spirit of it is really the same.
  - pavel_lishin 12y ago
    > So it's better to compare it to the idea of eliminating all the jews during WWII (however it also isn't perfect comparison, because jews aren't really a different species). I've also never been bitten by anyone of Jewish descent, and while they're as susceptible to infection disease as any other human, they don't carry a disease that kills hundreds of thousands of people per year. So maybe this is kind of a silly comparison altogether.
  - jamesaguilar 12y ago
    That is probably the weakest Godwin-ing of a thread I've ever seen. Eliminating an unthinking species for good reasons is no no way morally equivalent to massacring an ethnicity for no particular reason.
    - krick 12y ago
      You see, people who wanted to kill all the jews or whatever you may think of as "evil" did so not because they are "evil". They didn't think "oh, I come up with such a horrible idea, cannot wait to put it into action!". They had perfectly fine reasons why they think it is worth doing so. And surely they didn't think of the creatures they want to destroy (jews, in case of the holocaust) as of their equals. As well as you have perfectly fine reasons to want to kill all the mosquitos and don't think of them as your equals. While saying it I don't honestly expect for you to understand that, because double standards are such a common thing today, especially for western people, but I find it both sad and funny that you are really thinking what you are saying. As do many others like you. At this point it might be expected for someone to point out that the same reasoning could be applied to, say, parasitic flatworms. Well, yeah. (Actually, I see the difference here, because when dealing with cestoidae we don't care about eliminating them totally, only about preventing them to get inside of you, your cow, etc. But that isn't the point.) That's why I'm not trying to argue if the idea of killing all the mosquitos is good or bad. (And if you are curious, I think it's bad idea, for purely ecological, and not some moral reasons, but, again, it's not the point.) But I'm feeling uncomfortable to the point of being irritated by hypocrisy of those who are implying that eliminating the whole species for the single reason of it making their own lives more comfortable has less moral complications than, say, holocaust. Because it doesn't. And, yeah, I find equally disgusting the way you try to use word "unthinking" as an excuse. "Thinking" is label you give to some chemical process in your brain. The life of mosquito is some chemical process as well, whether you chose to label his behavior as "thinking" or not. Technically speaking, there's no fundamental difference between you and mosquito. We may agree that level of complexity in mosquito's behavior doesn't deserve the glorious name of "thinking", but surely you can judge by mosquito's behavior that she isn't trying (I'm avoiding words like "wants" or "thinks" for purpose) to die. And of course for mosquito your life isn't of more value than her own. More than that: there's no real reason why your life should be more valuable than one of mosquito for some other human, especially if you are completely unrelated. So, ideally, by writing this I would want to make somebody to feel conscious of the fact that killing the mosquito is killing and killing out the whole species is genocide, whith all moral and biological implications of that. But, as I said already, I don't really believe I will. And the last thing: what I mean by saying "ecological reasons" or "biological implications" is that bringing cane toads to Australia also should've sounded as safe and really very cool and maybe even somewhat futuristic idea back then. I hope that everybody daring to participate in discussions about ecology and whatsoever knows how it turned out. And few dozen of similar stories as well. I don't really believe that we can be significantly more confident in our reasoning about such complicated matters today, with all our fancy theories and computing devices.

beloch 12y ago

Wiping out a species deliberately flies in the face of the philosophy of environmental conservation that we all learned in school and from media. However, we have wiped out organisms that threaten humans before (e.g. smallpox) and are currently in the process of wiping out others, such as polio and the guinea worm, which is a parasite that is ingested in contaminated water only to emerge, slowly and painfully, through the skin (see Dracunculiasis). In terms of deaths caused, mosquitoes are undoubtedly far deadlier than any species humans have eradicated to date. In North America they are more of a nuisance than a deadly threat, but the same does not hold true for large portions of the world where they are a major disease vector. They are unquestionably worth eradicating if it ever becomes feasible to do so. The question should not be whether or not we should eliminate the species of mosquitoes that feed on humans. Instead, we should ask how can we minimize the impact of eliminating these species. Can other species of mosquitoes that are not disease vectors, or other insects entirely, fill in the vacated niche? Is it possible to eradicate mosquitoes in test areas to see what the long-term impact is? If we do eradicate them globally, how long would we have to "hit reset" by hatching and releasing stored eggs if unforeseen consequences make it necessary?

hayksaakian 12y ago
Alternatively, can we nudge evolution in a desirable direction so that the disease spreading capabilities of modern mosquito's are surpassed by a new species that serves the same ecological role without spreading disease?
- aestra 12y ago
  Impossible. Even if we could nobody knows the full extent of the ecological role of mosquitos. When you are talking about ecology there are too many variables to know them all.
  - JoeAltmaier 12y ago
    Nature lost species all the time throughout history, and the world survived. I'd say, there are so many variables that the ecosystem can surely adapt to the loss of any particular species.

jimmcslim 12y ago

I highly recommend this Radiolab episode, "KILL 'EM ALL", which explores the same issue. http://www.radiolab.org/story/kill-em-all/ http://www.radiolab.org/story/kill-em-all/

sramsay 12y ago

Taken as a whole, the article says, "We don't really know what would happen." And while absolute certainty seems unlikely in an area as complex as ecology, it also seems foolhardy at best to act on the kind of (understandably) flimsy knowledge we now possess.

ianbicking 12y ago

Inspired by this article, and getting bitten by mosquitoes since then, and some of the more interesting species-targeting work being done, I've been thinking about this topic. There is a very major positive impact that mosquito elimination would have: we'd stop trying to suppress mosquitoes. We'd stop spraying for mosquitoes. We'd be more lax about standing water. Standing water is treated like something awful, and while it can get a bit smelly and obnoxious, that's because standing water is an interesting host for lots of life, and besides mosquitoes that life is mostly fine. Add in tick elimination and we could let many more urban areas go fully wild. More people would spend more time outside, and I think that would itself be a major ecological factor, as it would positively affect our attitude about the outdoors. There's a couple obnoxious insects, but nothing compares to the mosquito. Eliminate mosquitoes and suddenly the human race can come to peace with bugs. That would be hugely ecologically positive.

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- ianbicking 12y ago
  I thought about adding the qualifier "outdoor bugs" – indoor bugs are often problematic, but their elimination or suppression doesn't have much affect on the natural ecology.
- pavel_lishin 12y ago
  I live in New York. I care about bedbugs, sure, but mosquitos seem to find me all the time. Of course, it doesn't help that we had our own backyard with a pool in it - chlorinated, sure, but I guess those suckers are sturdy.
- reustle 12y ago
  Apparently it is my blood type or something, but I am constantly getting eaten alive by mosquitos. I grew up in rural Pennsylvania where they are common, so it was really annoying.

omilu 12y ago

I assume a lot of other animals rely on mosquitoes for food, for example fish and spiders. What would these guys eat when we eliminate mosquitoes.

seanflyon 12y ago
Other small flying insects.

frogpelt 12y ago

Okay, so it might be a good thing if we rid the world of mosquitoes. Could we even do that? How?

Lord_Zero 12y ago
A good start would be some injection or orally taken medication that causes mosquitoes to die after they feed on us.
DanBC 12y ago
There are limited mosquito species that carry malaria, and only the females bite humans. Those insects have specific wing-beat frequencies and a limited range of sizes. So it's possible to build "photonic fences" - sets of detectors to detect those specific mosquitos and then shoot them with a laser. http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mosquito_laser http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mosquito_laser If you make these cheap enough amd deploy them widely enough you'd cut down on the problem populations.
- martey 12y ago
  Since the "photonic fence" was developed by known patent troll Intellectual Ventures in 2009 and does not seem to have been ever deployed outside of their labs, the cynic in me thinks that it was only created to boost their PR efforts (there were dozens of articles at the time about how the laser system would eliminate malaria) and possibly increase their patent portfolio. https://www.google.com/patents/US20100186284 https://www.google.com/patents/US20100186284 http://www.malariaworld.org/blog/will-laser-technology-rid-africa-malaria http://www.malariaworld.org/blog/will-laser-technology-rid-a... https://www.techdirt.com/blog/innovation/articles/20120903/07334520256/forget-death-star-anti-mosquito-lasers-heres-how-nathan-myhrvold-can-help-tackle-malaria-improve-his-image.shtml https://www.techdirt.com/blog/innovation/articles/20120903/0...
ianbicking 12y ago
There's some good work being done: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sterile_insect_technique https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sterile_insect_technique – the current trials happening work by genetically engineer mosquitoes so they can't produce a certain protein that is important at the larval stage. They raise a bunch of mosquitoes, giving them the necessary protein (that they can't find in the wild), then sort out only the male mosquitoes, and release them in large numbers. The GM male mosquitoes overwhelm the normal mosquitoes in the area, but all their offspring will die. Seems like the big trials are all happening in Brazil (e.g., http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn25457-brazil-approves-use-of-genetically-modified-mosquitoes.html http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn25457-brazil-approves-...) It's done on a per-species basis of course, and they are targeting only the mosquitoes that spread disease. The worst species are often invasive species anyway, and aren't the only blood-sucking mosquito in these areas. So while it's a tool that could potentially be used to eliminate mosquitoes generally, that's not how it is being used now.

Cogito 12y ago

A few comments discuss the complete eradication of all mosquitoes, and the impact that would have. It is worth noting that only a few of the various mosquito species are vectors for most of the diseases we tend to care about, and as such the complete eradication of all mosquitoes is not necessary. You can eradicate just those species in order to remove the disease vectors, and replace them at the same time with a different mosquito that has a similar ecological role. Of course we don't actually know if disease-vector mosquitoes play a different role than non-disease-vector mosquitoes, but the premise need not be the removal of all mosquitoes.

guard-of-terra 12y ago

Can't we kill off mosquitoes and then release ones who can't drink blood? I guess they'll still reproduce, albeit slower.

trhway 12y ago

>Yet in many cases, scientists acknowledge that the ecological scar left by a missing mosquito would heal quickly as the niche was filled by other organisms. yeaaa... i can't wait to learn who will replace those mosquitos in the "human bloodsucker and malaria<or whatever else> spreader" niche. I'm sure it will be very polite and tender creation doing it quickly and painlessly ...

ck2 12y ago

How would we ever recreate dinosaurs without mosquitoes trapped in amber? But seriously, where do I donate to the irradiation of mosquitoes? I suspect it is not just a matter of money or Bill Gates foundation would be working on that (other than their genetic modification experiments).

cbd1984 12y ago
> the irradiation of mosquitoes Eradication. Irradiated mosquitoes would just make our problems worse.

hyp0 12y ago

Most of civilization's advances address problems created by civilization, especially density and diet. Eliminating the harmful mosquitoes will surely create some additional problems - but we'll deal with just as we have all the other problems we create.

MattWard 12y ago

hard to think there couldn't be negatives to this...some thing s we don't totally understand yet would harm anything that eats them, possibly reducing diseases would lead to over population of certain species as well

Jedd 12y ago

Since the goal is to rid ourselves of malaria, are there more sophisticated ways to do this that don't involve permanently eradicating some or all species of mosquitoes? I'm sure I read, perhaps mid 1990's in a New Scientist article, a proposition along the lines of: 1. obtain a good sampling of a/some mosquito species - keep them in a sealed greenhouse somewhere, ensuring they have access to clean blood (ie. no pathogens we care about) 2. eradicate them in the wild - at the time the expectation was a 'terminator' style gene that, once introduced into populations would, after say a dozen or so generations, lead to an exclusively infertile population, resulting in extinction 3. release the pathogen-free mosquitoes back into the environment - presumably after ensuring pathogens were no longer in the population, which I suppose means at least one generation of hosts - so it could be some decades. The idea was appealing because it means if we missed something fundamental during phase 2, it'd be possible to re-populate quickly, it could be repeated periodically if needed, and it could be performed on regional levels with good effect, especially if you toned down your expectations to 'drastically reducing prevalence of pathogens' rather than 100% eradication.

lxmorj 12y ago
Backup the species before deleting them in case there is an unforeseen dependency? Pretty clever failsafe, actually!
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winter_blue 12y ago

I think that, if we can, we should completely and entirely get the world rid of mosquitoes (and tsetse flies as well if possible). Several species have become extinct in the world's history -- in fact far more species have gone extinct than extant today. Diminishing mosquitoes to EW (Extinct in the Wild) status would save millions of human lives. Malaria isn't the only disease spread by mosquito. Mosquitoes are responsible for transmitting several diseases. The "aedes aegypti" species of mosquito doesn't spread malaria, but several other debilitating diseases including dengue fever, chikungunya, yellow fever, etc.

lovemenot 12y ago

A little disappointed that neither the article nor comments have made much of the argument that any species which has made it through billions of years of evolution is intrinsically a thing of value. As for planned extinction, I feel the bar should be set high: we needn't know, right now, what their long-term value must be. Nevertheless, if I try to find some specific value to mosquitoes, it is likely related to the thing that also makes them pernicious. They are evasive, clever, micro-scale hunters some of which have co-evolved with humans for millions of years. Their feeding indicates they might be used for drug delivery, weapons, communications, logistics. Just from one person's point of view, it would be a shame if, ten years after total eradication, Moore's Law delivered a boat-load of potential applications for mosquitoes. And of course if these insects have a say in the matter, we know how they'd likely vote.

baddox 12y ago
> A little disappointed that neither the article nor comments have made much of the argument that any species which has made it through billions of years of evolution is intrinsically a thing of value. When you dabble in evolutionary determinism, you run into problems, because humans seem to have free will but also seem to be the result of evolution. So when it comes to decisions by humans, it's hard to say which choice is "interfering" with evolution. I would say that, by definition, no human action is interfering with evolution, assuming that humans are the result of evolution. If we do decide to eliminate mosquitoes, well, that just means humans evolved to eliminate mosquitoes, and mosquitoes didn't evolve to survive such attempts.

JDDunn9 12y ago

Killing off all the mosquitoes is pretty challenging. Mosquitoes have a short flight ranges, from 300ft to 3 miles. So whatever method you use has to cover every mile of land. They are attracted to CO2, which makes it difficult to make a trap that is any more effective at attracting them than every other person around. Bats can eat a lot of mosquitoes, but they also eat a lot of other insects too, which would have side-effects.

kristiandupont 12y ago

When the world started switching to LED-based traffic lights, cold places suddenly discovered that there was a problem: they would get covered in snow. Turns out that the old incandescent ones had a solution to this problem in giving off heat. As trivial as it is once you think about it, it was a problem that we didn't even realize we had solved. I always use this as an example of how bad we are at predicting the outcome of our actions. It's why small iterations make so much sense. For running your company and for anything. Eradicating mosquitoes might seem harmless in any way we can think of (even though the article gives good examples of why it probably isn't), but even so, such a massive change in the eco-system is bound to have a bunch of really severe consequences that we hadn't foreseen.

blaze33 12y ago

Reminds me of the 4 pests campaign in China, 1958 [1]. "By April 1960, Chinese leaders realized that sparrows ate a large amount of insects, as well as grains. Rather than being increased, rice yields after the campaign were substantially decreased." [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Pests_Campaign http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Pests_Campaign Not related, a 2011 study (edit: this in fact credited in the article) found out that eradicating mosquitoes in the french Camargue led to house martins having trouble finding food and correctly feeding their offspring. [2] [2] http://www.tourduvalat.org/fr/actualites/indirect_effects_bioinsecticides_non_target_fauna_camargue_experiments_calls_future http://www.tourduvalat.org/fr/actualites/indirect_effects_bi... Original study: POULIN B., 2012. Indirect effects of bioinsecticides on the non target fauna: the Camargue experiments calls for future research. Acta Oecol 44 p28-32. Appears we're not that good at predicting outcomes in complex systems.

simonebrunozzi 12y ago

What's the best mosquito repellent?