[eaandkw]

Not that I am in favor of parasitic worms or anything but I would be careful to assume that erraticating helminths or any species for that matter would only be beneficial. I don't know where they fall in the food chain. Maybe they are essential for some other species to thrive that we depend on.

[jessaustin]

...any species...

There are at least 300 species from multiple phyla that feed on humans. We might also consider those species that feed on our livestock, although such an action would have less ethical urgency.

It isn't impossible that other species might eat them, but given their baroque life cycles it seems quite unlikely that any other species depends on them for survival. But sure, if people decide to start with tests on isolated tropical islands, I won't argue.

[taneq]

Compared with the thousands of species that go extinct every year as a normal part of evolution, much less the tens or hundreds of thousands of species currently being wiped out by human activity, surely wiping out small group of species is not that big a price to pay for ridding humanity of a truly horrible affliction?

[henearkr]

We might even one day deem essential some parasitic worm when find it's the only mitigation against another animal regarded as a pest. Actually there are many cases in the natural environment where parasites like this are the vector limiting overpopulation. So eradicating the parasite could lead to resources depletion and extinction of the host species, or make disappear other species they feed on, etc.

[qchris]

I genuinely don't know the answer: is there another word for this concept, where a parasite benefits the species as a whole, but not the individual? That would seem to be a form of symbiosis, not parasitism.

>> there are many cases in the natural environment where parasites like this are the vector limiting overpopulation

Can you provide a couple of examples? I'd be interested in looking into this further to see how that works. Obviously, predators are a different category, and fill an important niche in the ecosystem, but I was unaware that species classically considered "parasites" performed a similarly important role. For example, ticks on moose seem very different from wolves hunting them.

[henearkr]

Here is the entry point that I read recently:

https://phys.org/news/2020-08-parasites-important.html

This is the link above which made me overconfident to easily find on the web many examples of such natural regulations. But I could not find a lot... what is more easy to find is mathematical studies showing the effect on populations.

Here is one study considering the potential implications of parasites eradication:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5222570/

For some particular examples, the red grouse is a bird whose population follows periodic cycles, and the cause is a parasite. Removal of the parasite smoothed out the population variations. You can imagine other species (plants or animals) whose own population cycles would be adapted to the old cycles, and these species would be impacted by the smoothing out of red grouses.

Link: https://www.jstor.org/stable/4694?seq=1

More generally, when a parasitic regulation disappears, the next in line would be resources regulation, that is the species starves when the food is scarce, and thus the population plummets. That could lead to a very different population dynamics (as the red grouse example shows, but there can be situations where the graph is sharpened instead of dampened like here), and because of that one or several species can disappear.

[qchris]

Hmmm, that's really interesting! Thanks for digging into it a little more and posting these resources :)