[Voultapher]

> Not that much [1].

Uhh, I read the paper and it's like here is evidence it would be a problem, anyway since there isn't any convincing evidence that it would be a problem let's just go ahead.

> “Mosquitoes are delectable things to eat and they’re easy to catch,” says aquatic entomologist Richard Merritt, at Michigan State University in East Lansing. In the absence of their larvae, hundreds of species of fish would have to change their diet to survive. “This may sound simple, but traits such as feeding behaviour are deeply imprinted, genetically, in those fish,” says Harrison. The mosquitofish (Gambusia affinis), for example, is a specialized predator — so effective at killing mosquitoes that it is stocked in rice fields and swimming pools as pest control — that could go extinct. And the loss of these or other fish could have major effects up and down the food chain. Many species of insect, spider, salamander, lizard and frog would also lose a primary food source. In one study published last month, researchers tracked insect-eating house martins at a park in Camargue, France, after the area was sprayed with a microbial mosquito-control agent1 . They found that the birds produced on average two chicks per nest after spraying, compared with three for birds at control sites. Most mosquito-eating birds would probably switch to other insects that, post-mosquitoes, might emerge in large numbers to take their place. Other insectivores might not miss them at all: bats feed mostly on moths, and less than 2% of their gut content is mosquitoes. “If you’re expending energy,” says medical entomologist Janet McAllister of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Fort Collins, Colorado, “are you going to eat the 22-ounce filet-mignon moth or the 6-ounce hamburger mosquito?” With many options on the menu, it seems that most insecteaters would not go hungry in a mosquito-free world. There is not enough evidence of ecosystem disruption here to give the eradicators pause for thought.

[JumpCrisscross]

You’re conflating eradicating disease-causing mosquitoes with eradicating all mosquitoes. To the extent that overinclusion occurs, it’s with traditional chemical pesticides. Not these novel methods.

No known species goes extinct if we eradicate disease-causing mosquitoes in the Americas. No known ecosystem collapses. Which is unsurprising, again, given they weren’t here until a few hundred years ago.

[Voultapher]

I'm criticizing a paper called "A WORLD WITHOUT MOSQUITOES". I find it does a very poor job of explaining on what basis they claim that all the food web issues would go away simply by "would probably switch" citation needed.

The paper does not focus on disease-causing mosquitoes in the Americas. I'm more open to that case, especially since they are an invasive species here, but that paper simply isn't a good argument for that case.

[JumpCrisscross]

> The paper does not focus on disease-causing mosquitoes in the Americas

The paper looks for the effects of eradicating all mosquitoes and fails to find evidence it would be ecologically catastrophic. That isn’t an argument for doing it. (Nor, as you say, evidence of its absence.) But it helps constrain the blast radius of more-limited actions, such as wiping out only invasive, disease-spreading ones, all Anopheles varieties or even all human-biting varieties. (And somewhat suggests “frogs and swallows” going extinct as a result is hyperbole.)