Eradicating Earth’s Mosquitoes to Fight Disease Is Probably a Bad Idea
motherboard.vice.comAlmost no support for the thesis of "bad things will happen if we wipe out mosquitoes" other than "We don't know what will happen."
On the flip side, we do know what will happen if the Aedes aegypti, Anopheles, etc... is allowed to continue to exist - 100s of thousands of people a year will die.
I wonder how the author would feel about keeping mosquitoes around "just in case", if hundreds of thousands of her neighbors were dying every year.
And guess what, if, for some very, very bizarre reason it turns out that Aedes aegypti/Anopheles was a super important species, there is zero difficulty in breeding and releasing billions of them back into the wild in very short order.
It's like modern culture is trapped in a cold-war b-movie about the excesses of science.
On the pro-science side there's singularities and AI fantasy and the anti-science side the planet is "being destroyed".
It's just one giant argument from ignorance, "we don't know, therefore you don't know, therefore we can say anything we like".
isn't that the argument that a lot of people use about religion too?
The author might as well say that we should keep polio around, just in case. Just because mosquitoes are macroscopic they have this perverse fear of unintended consequences.
I think you mean ascerbic lol.
Species go extinct all the time, and the world doesn't end. Wiping out one species deliberately will probably not be a disaster. Letting mosquitoes continue to exist is just as likely to "bring along with it an endless string of unforeseen consequences, one that could possibly be worse for humans than the problems we have now" as not doing so.
On the other hand, we should probably do some due diligence before deciding to embark on a mosquitocide, just to try and swing the odds in our favour.
I think the "how" is more important. Genetic modification sounds awesome, and really dangerous. If it's not just right, or if the potential of unforeseen mutations occurring is above zero, I think we risk too much regardless of the benefits.
I.e. please be completely certain that the GM offspring mating with female individuals will not result in some other side effect...
Other than movies, do we have any evidence that "GM offspring" (whatever that means, turns out defining "GM" is not as straightforward as one might suspect), are, in any way more likely to be dangerous than plain, vanilla, two-mosquitoes having babies offspring?
Because, here's the thing - we do know the implications of letting these mosquitoes live. 100s of thousands of people a year die. Every Year.
Do we have any evidence that it won't?
If you believe the Monsanto GM corn documentaries, releasing GM into the wild may have bad effects (intended or otherwise) outside the designated population. Plants are obviously not the same as insects, but I would prefer to err on the safe(r) side.
Edit: Also, a known bad is often better than an unknown.
The known bad is hundreds of thousands of people dying every year. It's pretty hard to conceive of how a laboratory tested solution which kills/slows down mosquitoes could be any worse than that, particularly when all sorts of genetic modifications are occurring by the billions in nature every single day without any testing/verification.
You know what would turn around everyone's attitude in about 7 days flat (probably fewer) - have those hundreds of thousands of people dying a year be white, rich, Americans. Every conceivable solution to wipe out the mosquitos would be developed, and rolled out with zero debate (and I mean zero - there wouldn't be a single naysayer of any merit)
There are miles of difference between altering an organism so it'll survive better against predators or poisons, and altering an organism so it won't reproduce.
People shooting any GM advance on the same basket as if every change was the same irks me. It's similar to talk about how computer malware is harmful, thus you must never install anything on your PC.
> if the potential of unforeseen mutations occurring is above zero
The potential of unforeseen mutations occurring is 100%, GM or no. How do you think species evolve?
I guess you just confirmed my point.
If your point is "genetic modification is no more dangerous than normally-occurring mutations", then I did.
If it goes wrong and they end up breeding super bloodsuckers, worst case we put them all through the bar exam ;).
"Regardless of benefits"? If they were killing hundreds of thousands of people every year in the US and Europe, would you feel the same? There's a risk associated with eradicating anything, but here the risk/reward balance is a little different than otherwise. It's worth a bit of risk to destroy the number one killer of humans worldwide.
We definitely should. I'm sure there are factors in the ecosystem that rely (but maybe not depend) on mosquito presence.
That's why I love the idea of being able to genetically modify them to produce only male offspring. It provides a nice, asymptotic curve way of culling the population without dramatically changing their ecosystem overnight
Yeah, even if there are no obligate mosquivores, we're perturbing a chaotic system, which is defined by sensitive dependence on initial conditions. Any action we take (including none at all) is going to have some arbitrarily large (or small) effect on the future state of the system.
If it works exactly as described, the 'only male offspring' modification should be nice and side-effect-free. But then, evolution is a big-numbers statistical game. Who knows what interesting variations we'll see..
it's quite possible that mosquitoes that don't require a male to procreate will take dominance. I think there are wasps like that...
True, species with heterogametic females (such as some reptiles) will revert to parthogenesis if no male is available. If mosquitoes are like that (are they?) then that could lead to all sorts of interesting consequences after a dedicated push to release infertile males.
the article keeps conflating the idea of eradicating human-disease-causing mosquitoes with eradicating all mosquitoes. Presumably the strategy of genetically sterilizing male mosquitoes, for example, would only work for aegypti. The article itself says, "there are thousands of different mosquito species found across the planet, and relatively few of them impact human health"
So eradicating human-threat mosquitoes may not have such a large effect on the global mosquito ecosystem.
On HN several times (that I've observed), this issue has come up and the starting point of the discussion acknowledges the fact that "mosquito" is not just a single species. And we're mostly all just lay people on the subject who can use google.
It's disappointing to see an ostensibly researched article not even approach our remedial level. I wonder why anyone would upvote it.
use the Flag button on article's like this. If you see articles getting upvotes, and you read the article and think "this is a crappy, poorly written article and a waste of all of our time", Flag it.
I didn't think that I should use flag as a simple downvote.
From the guidelines: "If you think a story is spam or off-topic, flag it by clicking on its "flag" link. (Not all users will see this; there is a karma threshold.)"
"Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic."
flag it for me please
TL; DR: We actually have no idea what impact there is to having or eradicating mosquitos. So let's do nothing.
to which the answer is, more research to discover what mosquitos connect with and are any of the connections beneficial
mosquitos inhabit a niche which could be filled by another organism were they to be eradicated and then we're back to square-one in a new way
but yeh let's eradicate them
I think that irrespective of the title and the benefits of conservation of the ecosystem, letting mosquitoes stay alive needs a far more compelling argument than "it might take away some other animal's snack"
I'm not convinced disease is inherently bad for a species. Sure it's bad for the poor individual that catches it, but who knows what the total net sum gain/loss is. For all we know the net result could be a higher rate of extinctions as species end up with overall weaker immune systems.
While there is some truth in that, the thought that we should allow natural culling processes to continue to thrive so that the rest of the surviving genetic population can improve the species goes against many core principles built into our society.
The core principle built into our society is that a lot of people on earth must suffer and die so that the lucky few can live the prosperous lives we do. Just saying.
Admitting it is maybe not so popular.
That's extremely cynical and unwarranted.
Cynical, no doubt. But unwarranted?
I think that reasoning is less applicable to a species like ours, which has so much power to collectively and conciously take action. In my opinion "let nature take it's course" is just a fancy way of saying "give up".
I nominate you to tell this to all the people suffering from malaria and zika.
> On the other, a feature in Nature in 2010 found that there were no species who relied solely on mosquitoes
Sorry, Nature, but I can name several species that could not live without mosquitoes, and you should be able to do the same also. This would be like banning the milk for babies because humans don't depend solely on milk and can eat many other things.
I can't name any. I'm stuck on the image of a cartoon frog hitting a mosquito with its tongue.
Discussion on whether eradicating an entire species would be good or bad assumes we actually can eradicate an entire species. How easy it is to do that? I mean, can we be so sure this is possible?