You're looking at Less Wrong's discussion board. This includes all posts, including those that haven't been promoted to the front page yet. For more information, see About Less Wrong.

Dr_Manhattan comments on Now is the time to eliminate mosquitoes - Less Wrong Discussion

21 Post author: James_Miller 06 August 2016 07:10PM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (75)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: Dr_Manhattan 07 August 2016 04:01:44PM 0 points [-]

I agree figuring out whether this might collapse ecosystems is important, (and what this collapse would entail, it would probably go beyond mosquitos and lead to some species rebalancing, but pretty darn sure not "destroy everything" either)

Comment author: tut 08 August 2016 06:03:26AM *  0 points [-]

There are mosquito populations that you shouldn't try to exterminate, because they are important to their ecosystem. If you get rid of them a bunch of birds have no food and so they are gone too etc. But they are up here in the arctic. Getting rid of all the tropical mosquitoes is good for everyone and does not have any great effects on any ecosystem. Everyone that eats mosquitoes there also has other insects that they prefer to eat.

Comment author: HungryHobo 11 August 2016 11:38:58AM 5 points [-]

There's about 3200 species of mosquito. < 200 bite humans and perhaps a dozen are major disease vectors for humans.

We extinct about 150 species per day without really trying. Increasing the number of species we push to extinction by 10% for a single day would save half a million lives per year.

Comment author: James_Miller 21 August 2016 04:30:24AM 1 point [-]

These are important comparisons.