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by coldtea
4630 days ago
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>It's bizarre for a population bottleneck in 1852 to have lasting effects (on the size of the population) over 150 years after the cause of the bottleneck ended, much as I don't expect the number of mosquitoes in 2014 to go down no matter how many I manage to kill in 2013. A bizarre claim. Unless you factor in your inability to kill that many mosquitoes. Else, if you kill enough of them (or all), their 2014 number WILL go down. After all, there are species made extinct, as well as lots of species that had their populations shrink significantly as a result of human action (sometimes temporary). |
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If you kill less than that, then the 2014 population will be determined by the environment of 2014, mostly without reference to 2013. I pointed out below your comment that if mosquitoes could reproduce merely as fast as the Irish between 1961 and 2011 (and in reality they do it much faster; a female human can't have more than about 15 children, whereas a female mosquito can easily lay several hundred eggs), and their generation length were one year, then they would recover fully from a blow much larger than the potato famine two years after such a blow occurred.
Having looked into it, I see that the actual generation length of mosquitoes ranges from several days (!) to one month. So with very high confidence, I can say that the effects of a raging mosquito genocide will not be felt by one year after it has concluded, unless ALL the mosquitoes in the area were successfully killed.
You might find http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/21/if-i-hadnt-kille... to be of interest.