that we know of Natural systems are like huge codebases built by novices. That variable you are changing shouldn't cause the whole system to collapse, but... see cases like the Cane Toad in Australia.
It's a system with an incredible number of fail-safes. Only a massive change (say, a meteor, a super volcano, or, I dunno, pumping trillions of tons of carbon into the atmosphere) could cause the whole system to collapse.
Killing off one tiny piece of the puzzle (if that's even possible) won't do it. For all of the hang-wringing about "what about the bats|birds|frogs|fish who need mosquitoes to live" the evidence indicates mosquitoes are a small percentage of their food supply in all cases.
Humans have already disrupted ecosystems with climate change, which has caused a massive rise in mosquito populations in many regions. Malaria and Zika are now a threat in places where they weren't as recently as a few years ago. The disruption has been happening for decades and mosquitoes are the result.
So...I doubt we have the technology to actually eradicate mosquitoes, but if we did, any harm it would cause would be vastly outweighed by the good.
I'm in favor of wiping out mosquitoes, but I think people are generally more concerned about _disrupting_ the ecosystem; not outright collapse. You're right that it's unlikely wiping out any one particular species would collapse any ecosystem. But it can certainly cause dramatic shifts in ecosystems, which people generally don't want.
For example, we recently re-introduced wolves into Yellowstone park. It was done because previously we had wiped out the wolf population, and we're now trying to re-establish it (we did a lot of bad things to Yellowstone historically, but luckily we've spent the past decade or so rebuilding it. The bison are thriving again!).
But, for economic reasons, we used the wrong wolves; cheaper wolves (seriously). Well ... that hasn't gone well at all. They've started wiping out other species in the park, and now that the park is bereft of other large game, the wolves are going after the bison. The bison we _just_ re-established. Luckily the bison are very robust and difficult beasts to hunt, but that doesn't help the fact that the other species have been decimated.
Has the Yellowstone ecosystem collapsed? No. But it has changed; changed by introducing just one species. And the change is quite dramatic.
I don't really care it does disrupt an ecosystem, because the total disruption will be reduced.
Humans suffering from horrible diseases disrupt much. Disease is one of several things that keep people in poverty. People dying is expensive and causes a reduction in skill and investment in trying to save those suffering. Then there is the emotional cost of death by disease. People in poverty do shortsighted things like clearcut jungles to grow food.
That previous argument totally ignores any value judgment. Values judgments like how I value humans more than ecosystems so shitty as to be disruptable by removing 1 parasitic species. Malaria is one of the single most dangerous things to humanity, ever. Killing mosquitoes deal with the problem. The amount of innovation, art and good works lost because of people who died to malaria is staggering. At modern rates it kill more than a million people per year. With that amount of lost effort not lost we could build hundreds of ecosystems.
> With that amount of lost effort not lost we could build hundreds of ecosystems.
That's...not really how ecosystems work.
I agree that the benefit to humanity is probably worth the consequences, especially if they're minor, as seems likely. We still need to learn as much about those consequences as possible, if only so we can prepare for them in advance. We aren't currently capable of wiping out all mosquitoes, so it's not like we're holding back a sure-fire treatment.
And it's pretty silly to assume that only unimportant ecosystems are vulnerable to the loss of a single family. You know how screwed we'd be if bees vanished? Mosquitoes are pollinators too. As it happens, they're not primary pollinators, so it's probably okay, but that's the kind of thing we need to know about.
You are aware that, like, humans are part of the ecosystems, right? That we depend on these ecosystems to keep working if we want to survive? We don't preserve bees (being the classic example) not "because ecosystems", but because without bees, far less pollination, without pollination no food, without food we starve to death.
In some ways we are, but unlike every other animal we can choose to destroy or create a new ecosystem. For an extreme example, how much do astronauts participate in any natural ecosystem, and what is the ecosystem of thousands of square miles of farmland.
With the effort of millions of people not dying and struggling we develop new farming tools and tech, produce more food on less land (as has been the trend for the past 50 years) and could plant 10s of millions of trees and reclaim lost jungles lost to subsistence farming.
Overall, I don't really understand what you are trying to say?! That there is no damage we could possibly be doing to ecosystems that couldn't trivially be undone? That we don't really need any ecosystems, but could just trivially transition to completely artificial food production? That planting 10s of millions of trees will bring back extinct life forms that had yet-undiscovered secrets in them that we could have used to derive new materials or drugs?
