Posted by benbreen 1 day ago
Do we want to eradicate mosquitoes?
Yes; fuck them.
We (intentionally or no, mostly not) cause the extinction of hundreds to thousands of species every year for much more mundane reasons: deforestation is the big one, climate change another. And that buys us arguably nothing but enriching people that benefit from the process of deforestation and climate change--folks that're economically desperate enough to log illegally, and energy barons. These extinctions are mostly tragic, and the net benefit to human societies is likely negative.
Mosquitoes are fucking evil. They kill more humans every year than any other animal. Malaria is only the most well-known disease they spread; see also dengue ("breakbone fever", named for what it feels like), West Nile virus, and more. Those that malaria doesn't kill are frequently left with a low-level chronic infection that makes them less effective as people. Malaria and mosquitoes kill children, disable the working population, and economically cripple entire nations.
As best we can tell, things that eat mosquitoes also eat other things. But I'd vote for nuking the mozzies from orbit even if that weren't the case. They're such an unmitigated cause of human suffering and hardship.
They're not evil, they have zero idea about the consequences of their actions. I think this viewpoint is why people are hesitant to just make things go instinct because people don't like them. Yes there might be good scientific / humanitarian reasons for it, but mosquitoes "being evil" isn't one of them.
Anyone knows more about the author? The info there is a bit scant and I'd like to read more from her.
I found one Maya Rosen online[1] but she seems to be devoted to Jewish texts, Judaism, and all that. Does not seem related to this, but it might be her?
(I don't know what the Amazonian frog eats; my point is that biotopes are complex and second- and third-order effects need to be monitored. That's why smaller interventions - e.g. making humans poisonous to mosquitoes, pushing them to the evolutionary path of avoiding humans - would be better than whole eradication.)
Larvicides can still be a thing though. No benefit in keeping those around.
She mates only once, which is why releasing sterile males works to reduce mosquito populations.
https://www.rockefeller.edu/news/38495-what-we-got-wrong-abo...
the paper:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S096098222...
Not to mention the many species of, e.g., birds, etc., that rely either heavily, or almost entirely, on mosquitoes, as a food source. One does not simply eradicate an entire species, through genetic sorcery, for the entire planet, without causing negative side effects.
This is just like cloud seeding. A few powerful idiots ruin it for everyone else, in the service of accomplishing a specific goal. We are likely experiencing major changes in the regional climates, as a result of cloud seeding. For example, right here in Idaho we are stealing water from clouds floating overhead, through a cloud seeding program primarily driven by Idaho Power. Do I benefit from this? Of course. We use the irrigation water and benefit from the cheap electricity rates. At what expense? Who knows. Somewhere east of us is likely getting royally screwed. As long as we have what we need here, though, who cares about anybody else or the rest of the planet's ecosystem, right?
The hilarious part, to me, is the fact that those who get excited by this idea (obliteration of entire species through genetic engineering) are the selfsame supposed champions of the climate when it comes to "GlObAl WaRmInG", asking for us to send our money to the Guberment to fix the problem. I guess it's not too surprising, since these people don't think for themselves; they are simply following with the TV told them to think.
Does anything eat them as food? Wouldn't it be environmentally damaging to remove a source of food for X?
Joking aside, the consensus seems to be that the effect of removing disease-carrying mosquitoes (not all mosquitoes) from the environment is minor compared to how many lives it can save.
Is your level of knowledge on this just "there are other things called mosquitos ergo it's not a problem," or do you have deeper affirmative knowledge that the animals that eat these mosquitos also eat those other mosquitos, and that those other mosquitos can increase their population to replace the lost food source?
That's called risk.
Pointing out risk is not "fearmongering" lmao
Pointing out risk is a kind of fearmongering when it's technically real but too small to be worth worrying about. Asteroid impact is a real risk too.
In Europe though, where aedes aegypti didn't exist 20 years ago, it's probably the other way around: what did the introduction of this new species damage? (apart from making the summer unbearable outside if any of your neighbour isn't very strict with standing water elimination)
A billion human lives, or some sad trout who have to eat fruit flies instead. For me, it’s an obvious choice.
I just can’t understand the level of smugness it must take to insist that we must force another billion people to die of horrible diseases like malaria, because you want the moral high ground. How do you even tell yourself that killing all those people is the moral high ground?
Yeah, it gets a bit silly real fast. I've never been accused for forcing a billion to die, so thanks for that.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_fatality_rate_in...
In fact, no, they did not say that. They said that the considered balance of the merits strongly favors eradicating the 2% of mosquito species that carry human diseases for someone who gives greater weight to the benefit of saving a billion human lives[0] than to the cost of some trout eating the thousands of other mosquito species instead.
[0] - 700 million contracted mosquito-borne illnesses each year worldwide. Death isn't the only consequence of significance.
If it took a couple hundred years for this species to proliferate, it's absolutely plausible that eradicating it in a few years will have surprising second- and third-order effects.
Do you understand that time scales are important here?
There are also species that have invaded areas that are totally impossible for them to reach without seafaring or airfaring human civilizations to carry them.
All terms are made up. Some are useful and some are not. This one is useful.
Merely calling it invasive does not answer that question, ergo it is not a useful term in this conversation.
And yes, timescales do matter. A species can become critical to its new ("invaded") ecosystem within a few hundred years such that removing it within a few years will cause catastrophe.
I don't get the "but what if it's somewhat - not infinitely - bad" argument? The known good is so dramatically good that we'd need a shocking amount of unknown bad to have made it not worth it. But if I'm choosing between mosquitoes, and say... fish, frogs, and a variety of birds, yes, get rid of the mosquitoes.
We start spraying crops so we can end world hunger (or just make more money) and screwing around with other things and now we're killing bees and other things. This will ultimately come to haunt us.
The death of all bees would count as infinitely bad (in terms of crop pollination) and we're doing a very good job in making that happen.
If 20,000 humans weren't significantly harmed from disease because of this release, but 70,000 frogs faced starvation, which would you choose?
If we lose those frogs, it most likely would cause a cascade across other species. There are lots of things that eat frogs.
They're only applied to thing we don't want to do.
In reality, it's always true that we don't fully know, so applying the argument always means "let's not do this".
In the end, whose lives do you prioritize given the lack of information today, and the lives at risk today? Deciding to do nothing still costs lives, and potentially drives us further into the bad state area.
A gene which incurs a fitness cost will be purged from the population under selection!!
It has been used to suppress screw worm in the United States for decades until the administration cut the funding.
These are almost always a temporary solution that need constant funding and seasonal releases to work. The populations will surge back as soon as it's stopped.
If it's one-and-done, everywhere on Earth (eg smallpox), it can work. If it drags on for decades or isn't rolled out globally (eg malaria) then it won't work.
Several insects are like this. In the species I'm familiar with, the male member breaks off inside the female locking all other males out.
Releasing sterile screwworms in Panama has been the main method of protecting US beef/cattle production from the insects spreading north out of South America.
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/what-to-know-about-the-n...
This is at best a temporary solution.
The US has been funding spraying of coca farms in South America. Roundup is one of the major herbicides. "Roundup Ready" crops are genetically modified to make them resistant to glyphosate. Samples of roundup resistant coca plants had been found in Colombia & Bolivia. It was thought that someone put a lot of effort into genetically modifying the plants, but it turns out that the samples were not GMO but rather mutants. Collaboration between coca growers spread the resistant plants.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roundup_Ready
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boliviana_negra
https://web.archive.org/web/20050205025108/http://www.wired....
We could in one stroke take half of what multi-billionaires and quasi-trillionaires have hoarded. If they didn't have personal accountants, they wouldn't even notice it, as they have far more money than what they manage to burn through - and we would have the means to "choose" to solve real problems affecting hundreds of millions of people.
It's debatable whether taking half of billionaires' wealth would materially advance the efforts in those areas.
What seems far less debatable is the political consequences of the accummulation of so much wealth — coupled with essentially zero legal restrictions on the use of that wealth in the quest for (governmental) power.