[arel]

Serious question - Why can't we put our minds to it and kill them all?

Why can't we banish this mass killer and cause of immense suffering to humans and animals alike.

I haven't seen any compelling evidence that they form any vital component of ecosystems apart from obviously spreading disease and applying some adapation pressure - which we could eliminate like we have done with lots of other killers.

[grawprog]

>I haven't seen any compelling evidence that they form any vital component of ecosystems

https://mosquitoreviews.com/learn/mosquitoes-purpose

>As part of their useful role, the larvae of mosquitoes live in water and provide food for fish and other wildlife, including larger larvae of other species such as dragonflies. The larvae themselves eat microscopic organic matter in the water, helping to recycle it. Adult mosquitoes make up part of the diet of some insect-eating animals, such as birds, bats, adult dragonflies and spiders. They also help pollinate some flowers, when they consume nectar.

[bryanlarsen]

AFAICT, the more serious proposals to eliminate mosquitoes target the individual mosquito species that spread disease in areas where there are several other mosquito species that would quickly expand to fill the ecological gap.

[core-questions]

Yeah, that's the difficulty. In fits of scratching and waving my arms on camping trips of yore I too have felt the urge to just pour a trillion liters of pesticide over the world and kill all of the little flying bastards in one fell swoop (har har). Problem is, it's actually really difficult to imagine such a plentiful and prodigious species _not_ playing a major food chain role. They're everywhere, and things that eat bugs are everywhere; it would be really hard to imagine their absence not collapsing some part of the food chain.

The only thing that would make sense to me would be to introduce some "invasive species" that eats the mosquitoes, doesn't spread the malaria, and can still be eaten by most of the things that eat the mosquitoes. Still, introducing any invasive species is playing with fire; it's literally impossible to know all the consequences in advance.

[snvzz]

>part of the diet

>help polinate

It all seems optional to me.

[erikpukinskis]

I am somewhat uncomfortable with the tech for eradicating a species (genetic bombs etc). It feels like a Pandora’s box.

I get similar vibes to nuclear weapons, like, should we be on this path at all? Does an ethical person walk that path, even for “righteous” ends, or is the ethical move just to sit down in place and make someone else drag you down it.

BUT, letting so many people die when you could help is also unethical. That’s very different from an atom numb... bombs don’t save lives.

Still, the idea of weapons that are sexually transmitted and eradicate branches of the tree of life is just a bone chilling concept.

[girishso]

You might be interested in GEM Mosquito Control [0], environment friendly and effective.

[0] https://www.appropedia.org/GEM_mosquito_control

[rsync]

That is, indeed, very interesting ... it reminds me of the "pot in pot" method of refrigeration:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pot-in-pot_refrigerator

[kickling]

Killing a whole species without damaging the ecosystem? How could we kill all mosquitos without killing all other insects?

[arel]

There are options to target them specifically.

For example we could progressively make them sterile.

[ethanbond]

But things eat mosquitos. I’m not sure where I stand on this issue but the targeted sterilization isn’t really addressing the concern.

[HappyDreamer]

I wonder if you would have written that, if your partner or sibling was dead from malaria.

I guess it feels different, when the affected people live far away.

I'd worry about global climate change, and do something related to that, not worry about "too few mosquitos". I read it's 400k people dead yearly from malaria.

[ethanbond]

Almost certainly I'd feel different. To be absolutely clear, I find the case for eradication to be extremely compelling for exactly that reason. The risk I have in my head that I want to mitigate, and which makes me unsure of where I stand on this issue, is not any sort of ambiguous "humans shouldn't play god" or "live and let live" or anything like that. The obverse risk we should consider when fiddling with an ecosystem on such a grand and potentially irreversible scale is whether we will accidentally disrupt the food supply in a way that's more catastrophic than the current catastrophe that is malaria.

There aren't many catastrophes worse than the current state of malaria, I absolutely agree and we in the western world ought to take it much more seriously. However, there are possible catastrophes that are much much worse, and fiddling with low level food chains is one of those actions that might open us up to such risk.

Again, not sure where I stand. What I do know is, presumably like you, I think we are not taking this seriously enough and addressing it with all the might that it deserves.

[HappyDreamer]

Ok, I agree about that, and thanks for having explained :-)

[UnFleshedOne]

That stance is only correct if you are reasonably certain that killing off those mosquito species will not result in more deaths from knock on effects.

[HappyDreamer]

Yes,

at the same time: Imagine if in the US: there was a new poisonous snake that killed 400 000 people.

Someone said: Let's exterminate that type of snake.

Then, do you think someone from the US/Europe/Australia would have replied "but maybe the snake is an important part of the ecosystem" ?

Would that have been a bit like not putting out a fire burning down a city,

because maybe the fire might cause certain unknown nuts to grow into plants and trees, the following years, and maybe maybe those trees were important somehow?

[HappyDreamer]

Ok so here's how I'd go about this:

Immediately start exterminating those malaria carrying mosquitos, without finding out how that'd affect the ecosystem.

Then, in parallel, start studies and research about how the ecosystem might get affected, and if very surprisingly (?), those effects seems like worse than 400 000 people dead, then rethink the exterminate-mosquitos project.

(GGP, ethanbond: Sorry if I sounded a bit harsh / not-so-polite in my reply. Turns out that was actually an a bit interesting comment / thing to think about, to me.)

[filleduchaos]

Eh, I live here and tbh I'd rather people just invested in better healthcare and antipoverty infrastructure than in grand ecological gestures.

[HappyDreamer]

Makes me wonder if you live in one of the bigger cities? There're fewer mosquitos in the cities?

Whilst if living in a village on the country side, and one uses the malaria nets, maybe that's different? (malaria bigger problem?)

Edit: now I just noticed in a recent comment you wrote that you have "lost count of the number of times [you] have contracted malaria". Ok so that's a very different reason, than what I would have thought. Makes me even more curious about if you live in one of the big cities, or on the countryside /edit

> antipoverty infrastructure

What'd be the most important such things from your perspective?

[tzs]

> How could we kill all mosquitos without killing all other insects?

Narrowly tailored insecticides are actually quite feasible. They are just quite a bit more expensive to develop than the indiscriminate kind so we rarely do so.

The key for a narrowly tailored insecticide is to base it on the hormones that regulate the insect's behavior. Insects are in many ways like little biological robots with a bunch of preprogrammed subroutines built in, with hormones triggering calls to those subroutines.

Say you have an insect that on the first summer evening above some certain threshold temperatures forms swarms two meters above patches of blue flowers next to ponds, where it mates, then the females lay eggs and die.

All those steps will be triggered by hormones. If you can identify the hormone that is released by the summer evening hitting the temperature threshold and synthesize that, then you might be able to spray an area with that hormone during the spring. That can then trigger the whole sequence of swarming, mating, egg laying, and dying to start early--before the weather is warm enough for the eggs to by viable, or even before the insects of reached sexual maturity so that the mating does not even produce fertilized eggs.

There are at least two very good things about this approach.

1. The insects do not evolve immunity.

2. The hormones for one insect are generally not harmful to things that eat those insects. Since those hormones already occur naturally in the insect, their predators are already exposed to them. All we are doing is messing with the timing.

These are expensive to develop because you have to really know the target insect. You need people to study its lifecycle in detail to identify what subroutines it has in its little insect behavior library. You need to identify the hormone triggers that affect the behaviors that you might want to use.

You probably also should verify that you have right insect. There was a case where an invasive species of moths (I think) was devastating crops in one state. In the state the moths were native to they were naturally kept under control by a parasitic wasp species that was also native there. An attempt was made to import the parasitic wasps (this was deemed low risk because the wasps could not survive without the moths, so once the invasive moths were gone the wasps would die too).

It was a good plan, and it would have worked except for one little detail. It turned out that there were actually two species of parasitic wasps that were almost indistinguishable. Only one of the two was a parasite for the invasive moth species. The other was a parasite for a different moth.

It wasn't until after the imported wasps failed to do anything about the moths that entomologists took a closer look and realized there were two species, and all the wasps that had been trapped for export to fight the moths had been collected in a place that had the wrong species.

Anyway, the bottom line is that you have to know your target really well to do the hormone based approach. And because it is so effective you can easily end up with an insecticide that will wipe out most of the target in a region, so you don't get repeat customers until maybe years later when the insect starts to make a comeback.

So you end up with an insecticide that was expensive to develop, might have a highly variable market, targets just one species, and most of the R&D for it does not really help with the next one you develop for the next species. That's just not economically worth it in most cases for most insecticide companies.

It might be worth it in this one case, though, perhaps as a publicly funded project. A lot would depend on how many different species of mosquitoes are involved. If only one or two are responsible for most malaria spread, it could be worth it. If there are dozens that are significant spreaders it might not be feasible.

[_Microft]

Mosquitoes are not the killer. The might be the messenger but they are not the killer.