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A Purdue researcher and a team of scientists working on a new insecticide argue that mosquitoes should not simply be made extinct due to their role in various ecosystems. Catherine Hill, a professor of entomology, and her team are developing an insecticide that will suppress mosquitoes' ability to transmit diseases without killing the insect or interfering with other life forms. The team is based in Discovery Park, a research park dedicated to using interdisciplinary teams to solve global problems. Hill's research was one of the winners of Discovery Park's Big Idea Challenge, a program that provides resources to interdisciplinary teams with innovative research.
"For the last 20 years I've been trying to figure out how to kill mosquitoes, and then I had this epiphany where, morally, I'm just not OK with it anymore," she said.
There has been a lack of research in preserving mosquitoes because researchers have looked mostly at ways to eradicate them. Therefore, Hill thinks it is essential to consider all the possible effects of wiping out an organism that has existed for thousands of years. She points out that mosquitoes have co-evolved with many species, so there are likely other organisms that depend on them as a food source.
https://phys.org/news/2017-07-mosquitoes.html
[Source]: Why mosquitoes should not be eliminated
I was reminded of:
Anyone who thinks that they are too small to make a difference has never tried to fall asleep with a mosquito in the room. - Christine Todd Whitman
Should there be a "Save the Mosquito" movement?
(Score: 4, Insightful) by t-3 on Tuesday July 11 2017, @09:29PM (13 children)
I think the point is that mosquitoes dominate a niche worldwide, and there would be an incredible amount of fallout from their extinction. Most freshwater fish that people care about depend on mosquitoes for food at some point in their life cycle, a large variety of plants are pollinated by them, many bats and bird species depend on them, and the cascading effects of their loss would change the world we know dramatically. Controlling mosquito populations is a solved problem, and most of the places effected adversely by mosquito-borne diseases have bigger problems (poor/no government/infrastructure and economic predation from more developed areas mostly), and lack of mosquito control is a symptom of those problems.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Zinho on Tuesday July 11 2017, @10:08PM (4 children)
I beg to differ.
"Depend" implies that they have no other viable option, that without mosquitoes they would die out. This is not the case, all freshwater fish have other food choices besides the larvae of biting insects.
Those same plants are also pollinated by other insects, and do not depend on mosquitoes for survival.
Also not the case; both bats and birds have significant other sources of food (e.g. moths and other insects).
This is pure conjecture. It is much more likely that the world will be nearly identical, just less annoying.
Let's move on to the real kicker, though:
This is patently false. If we were effective at controlling mosquito populations then cities like Miami, Atlanta, New Orleans, and Dallas would not need to repeatedly post warnings for their citizens to apply bug repellent in order to avoid West Nile and Zika viruses. The United States does not have Malaria epidemics killing thousands annually, but mosquito populations are simply being reduced, not controlled effectively.
Biologists in general are reluctant to recommend eradication of a species or any reason, and despite this the party line among them is that we really don't need mosquitoes. I'm not sure what caused the sudden case of conscience in this researcher, but he's living his career backwards - most people going into biology have to be convinced to shift in the other direction.
"Space Exploration is not endless circles in low earth orbit." -Buzz Aldrin
(Score: 2) by driven on Wednesday July 12 2017, @01:21AM (3 children)
Your rebuttal is also pure conjecture. I'll add my own and say that it would be much more surprising if removing a major food source from the food chain left things "nearly identical". A single brown bat can eat 1000 mosquitoes an hour [batrescue.org].
Who cares about brown bats? How about owls, snakes, raccoons, etc. that eat the brown bat. You can quickly see there are knock-on effects to disrupting the food chain. Nature has been balancing it for eons. Predicating the effects is not trivial, maybe not even possible with our current technology (look at all the ecological disasters humans have caused thinking they know better).
(Score: 4, Informative) by HiThere on Wednesday July 12 2017, @02:09AM (1 child)
In the couple of places where mosquitoes have been totally eradicated, no adverse effects have been reported. It's true the places were small islands, and I haven't checked back recently, but such evidence as exists seems to imply that the eradication of mosquitoes would yield no adverse result.
Clearly this needs to be confirmed on a broader scale before going global with the project, and probably a few should be kept in reserve in case it turns out in the future that they are, indeed, necessary. But the evidence I'm aware of indicates that a push forwards is desirable. However, some of the proposed methods seem questionable. In particular there is a small amount of cross species gene transfer that happens naturally. It's at quite a low level, but it's still enough to make some of the proposed methods worrisome. (IIUC the cross species gene transfer is usually mediated by a virus that uses reverse transcriptase, and it also seems as if there is often a need for a bacterial infection that moves from species to species picking up plasmids, and releasing them when injured.)
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by PocketSizeSUn on Wednesday July 12 2017, @04:28PM
Mosquitoes were introduced to the Hawaii islands. They seemed to function as a ecosystem just fine before the mosquito.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 12 2017, @03:58AM
Also, there are thousands of species of mosquitoes, and only a handful (20 or so) that target humans. Let's just wipe-out the 20 "bad" ones.
Hey, it worked for smallpox. We killed off the passenger pigeon (nasty creatures left droppings everywhere), the short-faced bear, the auroch, etc. etc. etc... Life goes on, but better.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 11 2017, @10:14PM
Bah, natural selection will get us new plants, fish, and birds. You just gotta have patience and wait 10^5 to 10^7 years. Jeesh! Environmentalist weenies are so impatient!
By "us," of course, I mean the Morlocks.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Runaway1956 on Wednesday July 12 2017, @12:11AM (4 children)
I don't know about fish, but birds. Swarms of mosquitos support swarms of birds. Sometime early in my life - between 1959 and 1962 - I was outside playing, doing whatever little children do. It was a bright, sunshiny day, and a cloud hid the sun. I looked up, and the cloud was a huge flock of birds. I guess it startled me, so I ran to Granddaddy, and pointed at the sky, and asked about the huge flock of birds. Granddaddy told me that when HE was a kid, the flocks were much larger.
Today, we don't see huge flocks of birds hiding the sun. Mosquitos are more or less under control, here, in the US, but the bird population is next to nothing.
I'm not exactly a bird lover, and I especially hate the fact that birds love to defecate on people and every thing that people own. But, still, life seems to be drying up in our world. Wherever there is an abundance of life, man moves in, and destroys whatever he can't tame. Sad, isn't it? And, ultimately, I wonder how well man will survive in his nice sterile world with no threats. Wipe out the mosquitos because we can't stand a little blood sacrifice to Nature, and with them, fish, birds, and who knows how many microscopic species. We do hate nature, don't we?
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 12 2017, @07:46AM
Might be less to do with mosquitoes and more to do with cats.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2013/01/29/cats-wild-birds-mammals-study/1873871/ [usatoday.com]
Cats kill all sorts of small birds whereas only a few species of birds are that dependent on mosquitoes (swifts and swallows?). Many others eat stuff like worms, fruit, seeds, nectar.
See also: http://www.nature.com/news/2010/100721/full/466432a.html [nature.com]
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 12 2017, @08:58AM
Yes, yes we do.
Just look at the ridicules "lawns" in North America. They are places of death. Green deserts. Then people bitch that the remnants of wildlife, like jackrabbits or ground squirrels or deer, destroy their vegetable gardens without a freaking clue as to why. You know, maybe because they have NOTHING to eat???
I lived in the country and had a garden and there were tons of rabbits. Funny enough, they never touched the lettuce or carrots or anything else. Rabbits and deer all preferred the "weeds" instead. No, not grass. Almost nothing likes grass, even cows don't like grass. They like dandelions and clover and chickenweed. I saw ground squirrel go from one dandelion to another eating its seeds.
https://extension.umd.edu/hgic/lawns/lawn-weed-identification [umd.edu]
See those "problems"? Maybe if people didn't see these as problems, we would have a better world.
But yes, humanity is mostly just "idiots at work". No clue what they are doing.
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Wednesday July 12 2017, @02:41PM (1 child)
Bats, dragonflies, frogs...
mcgrewbooks.com mcgrew.info nooze.org
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Wednesday July 12 2017, @04:12PM
Frogs. I stepped outside this morning for a smoke break. Something bright green caught my eye - looked down to see a frog, of some sort. He resembled a common tree frog - or at least what is common here in my part of the country. I think I mentioned "bright" green. So, I stepped around him, and not on him. I watched him for a couple minutes, to see if he were going into the plant, or if he would return to safer territory. But, he didn't move at all. I study him a little more, and realize the ants are crawling all over him. Nudge with the toe of my boot - no movement. He's dead. Damn, I don't know if someone did him in, or he was already sick and dying. Pretty little critter, too. He just didn't quite look like the tree frogs I'm familiar with - the green was brighter, and he had a rounder shape than most of them. Well, he's ant food now.
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Wednesday July 12 2017, @04:47AM
Don't worry; we'll have eradicated those fishes by overfishing long before we get even close to eradicating mosquitoes. ;-)
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 12 2017, @09:11PM
I read a book years ago on common fallacies, and several of the experts interviewed made a strong case that this notion of a "balance of nature" is absurd. The idea is usually everything will collapse dramatically if anything of any significance changes. Nonsense. Nature will re-balance easily over time to anything but massive effects - even that big meteor 70 million years ago didn't wipe out all life. I've been to snake exhibitions where they make some stupid case about how valuable snakes are to controlling pests, etc. Yet a number of islands (Ireland, etc.) have no snakes, and the effect on their overall ecology is zero.