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ChristianKl comments on Fighting Mosquitos - Less Wrong
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I'm a little cautious about deliberately eliminating a species, even a harmful to humans one. The environment is a complex system, and sticking our monkey hands in and pulling leavers can backfire in unpredicted ways.
What other environmental effects do the mosquitoes have? Do they control some other pest species? Are they food for something larger? Does the additional infection vector of mosquito bites significantly improve the general immune system functions of humans or other species bitten by these mosquitoes?
There are 3,500 different kinds of mosquitos and only 100 of them bite humans. To the extent that mosquitos are food for something larger the mosquitos species that don't bite humans can do the job.
I'm not aware of research showing improved immune systems because of mosquito bites.
How large is the population of the problem species compared to the population of the benign species? There probably won't be more mosquitoes of the benign species if we eradicate the problem species, unless we start to farm the nice kinds of mosquitoes or something. Also the problem species might behave more predictably to certain predators than than the benign species, and populate certain niches that have certain predators that are used to have them around.
Given that the whole process is about farming mosquitos, producing a few extra of the nice mosquitoes might be worked into the plan for reasonable extra cost.
Replacing the bad mosquitos with nice one's is also likely to make it harder for bad mosquitos to come back because their niche is filled.