Since when are we concerned with causing mass extinctions?
When CCP did a controlled eradication of pest animals destroying their crops, it caused the great Chinese famine and millions died. Mostly because these pest animals were natural enemies to even worse pests.
Although the sparrow campaign ended in disaster, the other three anti-pest campaigns may have contributed to the improvement in the health statistics in the 1950s.[18]
Seems the birds may have been the only screw up. No harm reported from the mosquitos, flies, and rats.
We can’t. There are effective population controls though.
Ticks on the other hand could disappear entirely and nothing would be impacted negatively. They’re useless parasites.
Ticks are bad, but have utility for scientists in seeing if predators of smaller animals have gone out of control in an area.
At the risk of derailing the conversation, if you haven’t seen The Last Wish, do yourself a favour.
If you’ve seen the first Puss In Boots and was dissuaded, give this a chance.
The animation is Spiderverse tier, the theming and context of the movie is very much not for children.
If you need convincing, take four minutes to watch this clip of Puss meeting >!death!<
There are only a few species of mosquitoes that pose a threat to humans (and several thousand that don’t). If we had a way to effectively eradicate those few species, then it probably wouldn’t have major consequences. They don’t fill an important, unique niche in their ecosystems like, say, bees.
But we don’t have a way to do that. Not without huge collateral damage from poisons and the like. There’s been some promising work with genetic engineering, releasing mosquitoes that will mate and produce non-viable offspring. This can greatly reduce a local population in the short-term, but they bounce back.
This can greatly reduce a local population in the short-term, but they bounce back.
Not necessarily, all attempts/experiments done so far have been intentionally limited. If we simply throw the dial to 11 and just absolutely flooded the areas it might have a much more long term impact and possibly eradication
The US entirely eliminated screwworms within its border in a very similar fashion 60 years ago and then wiped them off the whole continent just for good measure: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Olj8arvfYj4
If we actually directed effort at exterminating harmful mosquitos, they would be gone in a couple years.
It’s bizarre to me. We do so much carelessly, but here we’re being extra careful? 600,000 people die of malaria every year. A delay of one day means 1,600 people die.
There’s quite a huge domino effect in the food chain if we would cause mass extinction to mosquitoes as they are the food for many species of birds which are then food for the next thing and so on.
I’m no expert but what I’ve heard is that there are lots of mosquitoes that don’t bite which are more important for the food chain, but the ones that do bite make up a super small part so if we only eliminated the biting species there would still be plenty of other non-malaria-carrying mosquitoes for the food chain.
At least that’s the theory.
Surely something else could be encouraged to fill in the gap? Would love to see more fireflies.
Well in theory yes. However there are billions upon billions of mosquitos and therefore, despite their small size, they are a large bio-mass.
If we try and remove a large bio-mass like that from the ecosystem there’s bound to be knock-on effects in the food chain. We need to be sure that gap does get filled and what would fill that gap doesn’t have any effects that could be worse than Malaria i.e. an insect that could swarm and cause famine.
