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Comment by brownbat | Hacker News Reader

So many recent ones from mosquitoes, dengue or chikungunya.

More than almost any other near future technology, I hope for humanity's sake we quickly perfect a way to eradicate that demon insect.

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Assuming no unforseen implications, of course.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Pests_Campaign

Mosquitoes kill more people per year than every other animal (including humans) combined[0].

There may be unforseen consequences to eradicating mosquitoes, but to do nothing is already pretty catastrophic.

[0] https://www.gatesnotes.com/Health/Most-Lethal-Animal-Mosquit...

Mosquitoes don't pollinate, but they're food for a bunch of other animals up the food chain, no? (e.g. frogs?).

So if we did eliminate mosquitoes, it's probably not going to be a clear win.

I think they do not constitute a substantial portion of diet of any other animal. Source: an article about possible mosquito eradication that I can't seem to dig up :-/

As posted to a sister comment, I think Nature's review -- discussed in Radiolab -- is what people are thinking of.

https://www.nature.com/articles/466432a

https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/radiolab/articles/kill-...

There's over 3000 species of mosquitoes. Only 3 of those species are the primary carriers of these diseases. Only 1 species carries malaria. So we only gotta get rid of a small portion of mosquitoes.

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/invertebrates/gro...

I know there is some science backing the general approach, but doesn't evolution tend to pressure the virus developing different vectors, when faced with eradication? There is probably a good subset of the 2997 other species that could serve the purpose.

Probably depends on how fast the species is eradicated.

> but doesn't evolution tend to pressure the virus developing different vectors, when faced with eradication?

What does evolution “pressuring” mean? Either the organism (or virus) has sufficient chances to randomly mutate a a trait that enables it to survive, or it goes extinct.

Well, I meant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolutionary_pressure

Think of a population as holding at any given time a number of individuals carrying mutations. The fringe mutations, such as being able to be hosted by a different type of mosquito (say, better survivability in the host) don't provide much of a benefit to survival. But if the default host population goes away, those mutations become super valuable and will be selected.

See https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/transgenic-mosqui... for a discussion on this topic.

My vague recollection is that studies so far have found mosquitoes aren't the primary part of any particular species diet but the data is incomplete. We are still unsure if we can pull this block out of the jenga tower.

I think people are looking for this review in Nature, where they asked a bunch of ecologists if we could eradicate mosquitoes and the consensus was basically fine with it.

https://www.nature.com/articles/466432a

I think there's even an argument to be made that we should increase our risk tolerance relative to the scale of the harm, and if you study mosquitoes for even a little bit, the harm is off the charts. Fortunately ecologists pretty uniformly agree this is an easy case.

Perhaps the gene drive tech will work out: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-02087-5

Already failed. Sorry.

Or perhaps it has not succeeded yet.

https://ipscell.com/2017/02/mosquitoes-swat-back-via-resista...

I would prefer we eradicate the virus, not the insect?

By far my least favourite aspect of DEET is that it merely deters mosquitos rather than hurts them.

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