[SubZero]

How many bugs and spiders rely on mosquitoes as part of their diet? Out of all of the ideas in this article, not once was the impact to the biological food chain discussed. We can kill all of the little annoying things, but how many beneficial organisms are being supported by them?

[teraflop]

You must have stopped reading part way through:

> There’s little evidence, though, that mosquitoes form a crucial link in any food chain, or that their niche could not be filled by something else. When science journalist Janet Fang spun out this thought experiment for Nature in 2010, she concluded that “life would continue as before—or even better.” I arrived at the same answer when I looked into the same question for a piece published three years later. “There’s no food chain that we know of where mosquitoes are an inevitable link in a crucial process,” one mosquito-control expert told me.

[clord]

There will always be experts (and journalists) who can't think of the impact of some change. But I believe tropic cascades are a real thing in food webs, and we can't really know for sure that something will have no impact until we do the thing. If there is one thing we're learning right now, it's that these cascades are real and quite dangerous. Now that this is known, no one should in good conscience set off a possible cascade without knowing something about what might happen.

Humans can improve on nature once they understand the impact of an action well, so I'd get behind a well funded study into what effect getting rid of mosquitoes would have — one with an experimental basis and not just a journalist's thought experiments.

[sliverstorm]

That line from Fang continues to be quoted, but I never found the justification in her own article. It's been a bit since I read it, but I recall that she spent the entire article relating the various ways the absence of mosquitoes would damage ecology, and then concluding nothing would change.

[saidajigumi]

> not once was the impact to the biological food chain discussed.

The end of the article is specifically about this very point, and the uncertainties around it.

[Johnny555]

Also, Mosquito larvae grow in water and are a source of food for aquatic wildlife.

I seriously doubt that we understand every aquatic ecosystem well enough to know if eliminating mosquitos entirely would be harmful in the long run. And once we eliminate them, there's no going back.

[Turing_Machine]

No one is talking about eliminating all mosquitos (despite the headline).

There are over 3,000 species of mosquito. If there weren't any Aedes or Anopheles larvae in the water, other species would expand to fill the empty niche.

[guard-of-terra]

Unfortunately, I am a part of mosquitoes' diet, and will gladly want them to go finally and never return.

They make a great great deal of nice countryside not enjoyable. Even if they don't carry malaria or zika here, am I bound to suffer?