[blisterpeanuts]

Only 200 out of 5,000 known species of mosquitoes feed on mammalian blood. If we could only target those 200, we could remove a great source of misery from the planet.

In fact, only 8 species carry disease, e.g. zika, malaria.

That said, mosquitoes have been around for 100 million years and it seems unlikely we can wipe them out without some scary technology.

Probably for the foreseeable future we're going to have to settle for managing the problem, draining malarial swamps and encouraging predator species like dragonflies for example.

[ithkuil]

> draining swamps

How does that work? I moved to a civilised place in Italy, where the swamps have been drained centuries ago etc etc; there is no malaria anymore.

Yet, nowadays there are tons of mosquitos, I have nets on all my windows and doors and yet I have to occasionally kill them either mechanically (I'm getting good at it but still) or using poisons.

My <1y child has huge reactions when bit; I tend to stay inside because it's so annoying to get bit all the time; sprays work but not 100%, as if those mosquitos are adapting against the poisons we throw at them.

Are these non malaria-carrying mosquites more adapted to breed with less water? Did we stop doing a good job draining the swamps?

[blisterpeanuts]

Different species have different attributes. The tiger mosquito (Aedes albopictus) from SE Asia is invasive in the Americas and carries nasty diseases -- yellow fever, dengue, zika, chikungunya. It's a highly aggressive biter, highly adapted to marginal environments, and can breed in a tiny pool of water the size of a bottle cap. It tends to be active in human-settled areas. If ever a mosquito deserved to be wiped out, it's this one.

I'm not sure about Italy; I imagine you have plenty of species migrating up from Africa. If you have a lot of mosquitoes, probably there is a water source they're breeding in -- a pool, an old tire, a nearby pond? If you can find a breeding source, dump a mosquito puck in it -- a safe algae that kills mosquito larvae.

[f00zz]

There was an attempt to control the population of Zika-carrying mosquitoes in Brazil by introducing supposedly sterile GM mosquitoes. The GM mosquitoes ended up breeding [0]. I'm all for killing them all, but it doesn't seem easy.

[0] https://www.dw.com/en/genetically-modified-mosquitoes-breed-...

[marcosdumay]

> However, it was already known from previous laboratory experiments that a small proportion of about three to four percent of OX513A descendants can reach adulthood;

It was flawed from the beginning. The attempt got basically the exact result one would expect, and was reasonably successful in reducing the mosquito population. It was just not good enough.