[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.