Considering that most of the species that have ever lived on Earth are now extinct, it is not surprising to discover that the demise of one more would not have any catastrophic consequences in the grand scheme of things.
We were well on our way to getting rid of mosquitoes, incidentally, until we banned DDT. Millions of dead humans are the very real consequence of that decision.
DDT has never been banned for vector control. It's been banned for agricultural use, but only after it was so overused that most agricultural pests had already become resistant to it.
The idea that there exists a worldwide ban on DDT for vector control, and that out-of-control malaria and "millions of dead humans" were the "real consequence" is a complete fantasy. And a rather disgusting one, as well.
Good point. I should add that some countries still use DDT for malaria control and any country that wishes to use it to fight malaria is free to do so, there is no treaty banning its use for malaria control.
However, many mosquito species are becoming resistant to DDT, so it is not really useful any longer. For example, India has greatly reduced the use of DDT because most of its malaria bearing mosquitoes are resistant to it.
DDT kills mosqito predators too and the mosquito predators are usually bigger more complex creatures with longer lifespans so it is much harder for them to evolve a resistance to DDT. Thus the idea that you could wipe out mosquitoes with DDT is ridiculous. Mosquitoes just evolve resistances to it. However, you could wipe out many bird species with it.
Particularly disturbing are the sites with comment sections where it's taken a step farther than this, resulting in one of the brain-diseased diatribes against 'liberals' and 'government'. Ignorance combined with absolute confidence is the dangerous hallmark of our political times.
It's interesting to me just what a hot-button topic DDT continues to be. It seems that the moment it comes up in any discussion of something like bedbug proliferation, there's an outbreak of collective guilt about bald eagles and expressing anything outside this guilt quickly turns one into Tony Hayward.
Not that I want to endanger bald eagles either, but I'd be interested to see a less politically-charged, more pragmatic debate on the potential advantages and disadvantages of reinstating its use in limited capacities.
Sure, but I value human lives much more than animal lives. Our best weapon against malaria causes collateral damage to eagles. It sucks for the eagles, but it's more important to prevent the deaths of millions of humans.
The whole bald eagle or malaria dichotomy is false. Any country that has an actual malaria problem can use DDT to control it, if they think it is effective (however it is becoming less and less effective, because mosquitoes are becoming resistant to it). Some of these countries still use DDT. The US eradicated malaria from our borders by other means long time ago.
In the US the debate about DDT was whether to use it as a pesticide. So the choice was about killing the bald eagles and most of our other birds, or slightly increasing pest control costs for farmers and people with lawns.
It affects other species as well. Also, eagles becoming extinct will have far more consequences than a few fewer birds in the sky. Since they are apex predators, everything below them in the food chain will be affected. And guess what's also part of that chain? Farms and livestock.
Ecosystems are complex enough that we have very little information on all the interactions that could happen. It's more than just a bag of organisms mixed together. A better analogy is the network of files and components loaded up during the boot process. Especially early on, each piece is crucial to what happens next.
Humans are animals. What affects (kills them)animals affects humans(kill you).
We have one weapon way more powerful than DDT. It is called intelligence and knowledge, things like controlling pools of water is way more effective that DDTing everything.
People with lack of intelligence or knowledge wants a magic pill that solves all problems without having to think, but this has an enormous cost. When I eat fish from Ebro Delta I'm eating DDTs thanks to them(they are forbidden but some people continue using them).
I would not rely on our "mass intelligence" to be our savior. The behavior of masses is dominated by factors which are far far away the 'rational' choices and the best interests of whole communities. This is why we always talk about "if only we all did X", and the reason everybody in the pub knows the solutions of big social issues ("the solution is so simple, just do X") is because people assume that we can control ourselves and behave coherently as a group.
Yet people find easier to think of the problem from the other side and think that a bunch powerful people who bend the world to their own interests. It is true, there are those people, their effect is significant, but they are part of the game, they cannot control even themselves and their peers, not even when it would be in their interest (as a group).
Eagles are just the most visible symbol of this degradation of the entire food chain/ecosystem. You start doing something that kills the top or bottom of the food chain, and sure enough, the rest WILL follow, including us.
Millions more dead humans would have been the consequence of not banning it, as well. Society can't just keep going on dumping tons of highly toxic poisons into the ground and water indefinitely without paying the toll in organ disease, birth defects and cancer - and we are. DDT aside, most bodies of water near high population and agricultural areas are increasingly resembling toxic chemical soups, with a grand mix of industrial waste, agricultural chemicals, human and animal pharmaceuticals, petroleum runoff, etc., and with the financial interests of chemical companies and attitudes such as yours, this will only continue to get worse.
Edit: And a different take on the 'No' conclusion from the original link. Turns out 'Yes, in these situations, though maybe not and does that matter?' is the more accurate analysis of 3500 responses.
I don't particularly like mosquitoes either. But I wonder, despite the claim of no downside, if there isn't some co-evolutionary relationship between mosquitoes and those that they draw blood from.
My main fear was that removal of mosquitoes would give rise to another blood-sucking, biting insect to fill it's place. One that wasn't so slow, noisy and easy to repel with nets, repellant and clothing. A smaller, silent, insect would be far worse. Mosquitoes are the b52 bombers of the flying insect world - slow and easy to hit.
I get bad reaction to sandflies. If sandflies replaced mosquitoes, my world would be severely negatively impacted.
The large biting flies are a crazy phenomenon. They'll actually chase you, persistently. And they're HUGE. I was attacked by one a couple of years ago on Lake Michigan, and it just wouldn't leave me alone! I was diving, splashing it with water, running on the beach (it could fly about as fast as I could run) and no luck. I finally had to swat the vile beast.
If we kill the mosquitoes, and it leads to our downfall, then something will just evolve to fill our place since clearly we weren't well adapted enough...
Color me skeptical. The article is correct; other species would rise to fill the niche emptied by mosquitoes, and the world would achieve a stable equilibrium, but the same could be said for eliminating eagles or horseshoe crabs or wheat. Just because we'd be less itchy and never catch malaria doesn't mean our lives wouldn't be negatively impacted in unforeseen ways.
Hell, for all we know, polio is the cure to HIV and HIV is the cure for cancer. I'm not saying "Oh god save the mosquitoes," I'm saying there could be negative impacts beyond the consideration of the scientists performing the study.
The End Times are why True Believers are not only Pro-Life but also Pro-’liferation (of nukes). At least, according to that Maher movie, and the Left Behind series.
Malaria kills 1-3 million people a year, most of them children. Unless you think the lack of mosquitoes is going to kill millions of children every year, you should heavily favor exterminating mosquitos.
No. That's only part of the analysis. Mosquitoes may benefit, as well as harm, humans. For example, they may be keeping more dangerous animals or diseases in check in extremely subtle ways.
We can always keep some mosquitoes in a cage in the CDC in the unlikely event that they do turn out to be useful. Of course, I would be very interested to know what kind of benefits mosquitos provide to humans. Remember that while malaria's death toll is 1-3 million, there are 350–500 million infections per year. The cost of these infections is immense, both economically and in terms of human suffering.
"We can always keep some mosquitoes in a cage in the CDC in the unlikely event that they do turn out to be useful."
Say we kill all mosquitoes in the wild, and then discover that they were in fact protecting us from some Awful Thing. By the time we become aware of this, it may be too late to eliminate the problem by simply reintroducing caged mosquitoes to the wild, because some irreversible critical mass or adaptation may have happened in the meantime. (This is a Black Swan argument; it's a vaguely-defined scenario that seems very unlikely but potentially catastrophic.)
"The cost of these infections is immense, both economically and in terms of human suffering."
No doubt. But what we want is a cost-benefit analysis of removing mosquitoes from the ecosystem. Pointing to one large and obvious benefit does not help us calculate the costs.
Scientists did the cost-benefit analysis and came down hard on the side of mosquito extinction.
I have described the immense harm caused by mosquitos. I have looked equally hard for mosquito benefits and found none that can't be provided by other species. To stand on the side of keeping mosquitos, you must find a benefit that outweighs trillions of dollars of lost economic output, millions of man-months of suffering, and several million deaths per year.
And the less likely your proposed benefit of mosquitos is, the better it must be to win in the expected value calculation.
I think you overestimate how well we can predict the effects of a sudden extinction. From the Nature article:
"Views differ on what would happen if that biomass [of mosquitoes in the Arctic tundra] vanished. Bruce Harrison... estimates that the number of migratory birds that nest in the tundra could drop by more than 50% without mosquitoes to eat. Other researchers disagree...."
We're seeing disagreement on a hypothetical mosquito extinction's effect on the number of nesting birds in a certain area. If the experts are unsure of this, then it's fair to say that the total, detailed ecological impact is not precisely understood.
Also from the Nature article:
"Without mosquitoes, thousands of plant species would lose a group of pollinators. Yet McAllister says that their pollination isn't crucial for crops on which humans depend. 'If there was a benefit to having them around, we would have found a way to exploit them,' she says."
So if mosquitoes disappeared, thousands of plant species could be threatened. The researcher says that's probably okay, because if humans aren't directly using those plants, they're probably not important to us. But what about indirect benefits of those plants? Would the effects on those plant species have significant ripple effects on other species? I don't know. The Nature article doesn't talk about that.
Does this seem like the rigor necessary to justify a sudden ecological change in an extremely complex system on which billions of human lives depend? I don't think you can call this a sure thing.
>I would be very interested to know what kind of benefits mosquitos provide to humans.
As ab9 said, they could be outcompeting other pests that host far, far worse parasites. If mosquitoes were to disappear, these other pests would multiply to take over the niche and we would have something worse than malaria on our hands.
Of course, I'm not sure if there's anything like this. There certainly are other parasites, but I haven't heard of any where the hosts compete directly with mosquitoes. Then again, with something as huge as nature, there is always something waiting to be discovered. For example, we have been in contact with the host species for ebola for millions of years. Yet, ebola first appeared as late as 1976.
Something feels very wrong here. I can imagine a creature that promotes small amounts of blood sharing between different humans or creatures has positive as well as negative effects - and by definition we don't know what unknown benefits it has.
So let's kill malaria instead. How can we do that?
Engineering the extinction of this kind of hugely prolific and adaptive species looks to me like a mind-bogglingly hard problem, which the smart people linked to in the post are not directly working on (they're doing local control with superfancy lasers and possibly poisonous bait, so will probably only be offering sexy alternatives to mosquito nets and sprays). A possible approach would be to introduce mosquitoes that have a big competitive advantage over their peers initially but are ultimately (a few generations down) fucked, but to date I think humans have only figured out how to do that kind of thing with investment banks. (A hematologist friend once told me of another possible approach he thought might well work, but I was a bit drunk and he was speaking Greek, and in any case Gates said no.) A promising alternative that would render moot concerns about the eco-dangers of wiping out the mosquito would be to genetically engineer mosquitoes incapable of transmitting the parasite. That's apparently been done, but without the new safe mosquito having the survival advantage needed to dominate the species. See following, with footnote link to original paper: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/07/100715172002.ht...
The thing that worries me, and the thing that I think no-one has mentioned (apologies if you have) is that when did we have the right to exterminate a whole species just because it makes our lives uncomfortable?
I'm well aware that malaria and other diseases carried by mosquitoes are a very large killer in parts of the world but why aren't we trying to cure these diseases rather than wipe out a whole species?
It just seems as if we, as a species, think we rule this planet so can do whatever we want with regard to the other species that exist on it.
I seem to remember that back in the days of DDT, mosquitos were killed back to the point where malaria was no longer a big deal. Then the 70's happened, DDT went away, mosquitos and malaria came back big time, and farmers in Southeast Asia started dying in large numbers because the insecticides they used to replace DDT were actually harmful right now instead of 'probably carcinogenic over 20 years'.
Anybody know what the insecticide of choice is today, and whether it's as safe as (or safer than) DDT?
The difficulty is while we are well aware of this law, we don't know if it will apply. Did the world miss polio when it was gone? Or the bubonic plague?
There are always consequences of everything- hell, it's one of Newton's laws. But it's entirely possible there are no terrible awful consequences.
Well, we've mostly eradicated very human-specific diseases. Some do also infect other animals, but we've generally targeted very specific strains and species that are pathogenic to humans. We haven't completely eradicated an entire family of bacteria, or large class of viruses, which seems like it would be more comparable to eradicating all mosquitoes of every genus and species. It doesn't seem that hard to imagine unintended consequences if we eradicated not only the plague bacterium (probably Yersinia pestis), but the entire family Enterobacteriaceae, for example.
We were well on our way to getting rid of mosquitoes, incidentally, until we banned DDT. Millions of dead humans are the very real consequence of that decision.