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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.

Oops.




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