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The_Jaded_One comments on Now is the time to eliminate mosquitoes - Less Wrong
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Comments (75)
Is it a good idea to leave alive mosquitos that don't bite humans? How long would it take them to mutate and fill the "human bloodsucking" niche that is suddenly vacant?
Perhaps a more comprehensive program of disease vector eradication is in order. Any organism that acts as a flying hypodermic needle poses the risk of moving pathogens around between species. For that matter, there are a lot of parasites in the world that parasitise mammals. If they were all to be eradicated, predators could take up the slack, but predators such as foxes, wolves or lions are trivially easy for us to control in comparison.
Natural ecosystems are de facto bioterrorist labs that occasionally output horrors like AIDS and ebola and zika. Maybe human beings need to start a serious and far-reaching effort to shut them down.
Killing all mosquitoes would be way too likely to have seriously bad unintended consequences IMO.
It would be something that I'd like to ask an expert about, but I think it's worth considering.
More generally: the ecosystem we have today is almost certainly not the best one we could possibly have. Therefore there may be feasible positive changes we can make to it.
Define "best".
Good point.
I don't think "human bloodsucking" is the niche in which most of the competition happens. Human from which blood can be sucked aren't the scarce resource. Competition among larves looks to me like it's a stronger barrier.
I am not a biologist so I cannot comment on this. It is apparently the case that larvae compete with each other for microbes and algae as a food source.