Almost no support for the thesis of "bad things will happen if we wipe out mosquitoes" other than "We don't know what will happen."<p>On the flip side, we <i>do</i> know what will happen if the Aedes aegypti, Anopheles, etc... is allowed to continue to exist - 100s of thousands of people a <i>year</i> will die.<p>I wonder how the author would feel about keeping mosquitoes around "just in case", if hundreds of thousands of her neighbors were dying every year.<p>And guess what, if, for some very, very bizarre reason it turns out that Aedes aegypti/Anopheles was a super important species, there is zero difficulty in breeding and releasing billions of them back into the wild in very short order.
Species go extinct all the time, and the world doesn't end. Wiping out one species deliberately will probably not be a disaster. Letting mosquitoes continue to exist is just as likely to "bring along with it an endless string of unforeseen consequences, one that could possibly be worse for humans than the problems we have now" as not doing so.<p>On the other hand, we should probably do some due diligence before deciding to embark on a mosquitocide, just to try and swing the odds in our favour.
the article keeps conflating the idea of eradicating human-disease-causing mosquitoes with eradicating <i>all</i> mosquitoes. Presumably the strategy of genetically sterilizing male mosquitoes, for example, would only work for <i>aegypti</i>. The article itself says, "there are thousands of different mosquito species found across the planet, and relatively few of them impact human health"<p>So eradicating human-threat mosquitoes may not have such a large effect on the global mosquito ecosystem.
I think that irrespective of the title and the benefits of conservation of the ecosystem, letting mosquitoes stay alive needs a far more compelling argument than "it might take away some other animal's snack"
I'm not convinced disease is inherently bad for a species. Sure it's bad for the poor individual that catches it, but who knows what the total net sum gain/loss is. For all we know the net result could be a higher rate of extinctions as species end up with overall weaker immune systems.
> On the other, a feature in Nature in 2010 found that there were no species who relied solely on mosquitoes<p>Sorry, Nature, but I can name several species that could not live without mosquitoes, and you should be able to do the same also. This would be like banning the milk for babies because humans don't depend solely on milk and can eat many other things.
Discussion on whether eradicating an entire species would be good or bad assumes we actually can eradicate an entire species. How easy it is to do that? I mean, can we be so sure this is possible?