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Comment by ianbicking | Hacker News Reader

These kinds of changes would really benefit from mosquito eradication.

It looks lovely from above, and in a remote location of Idaho there's no one to care, but I'm sure it's absolutely teaming with mosquitoes, a kind of perfect habitat. And a perfect habitat for all sorts of other creatures and plants who bother no one.

It's not just because of beaver trapping that this waterform has been so systematically eliminated; people go to great lengths to remove backwaters just because of mosquitoes. If we made mosquitoes extinct – not just the disease-carrying mosquitoes, but any that bite humans – I think we'd see attitudes change surprisingly quickly, a sudden peace in an ecological war has lasted millenia.

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If it isn’t mosquitos it’ll be gnats or any other biting/stinging insect.

Fact is, removing insect biomass using neonicotinide insecticides has had major negative impacts on North American biodiversity.

It's true that getting rid of mosquitoes won't bring peace between humans and insects. But it would help, and if we could make them extinct then we could avoid all the collateral damage that occurs due to our efforts at partial suppression. Insecticides do more harm than the insects they target do good, so if we could target individual species for extinction (obviously a technological feat, but within the realm of possibility) we'd ultimately have a more diverse and healthy ecology.

Neonicotinoids aren't likely to be ingested by insects that don't eat crops (such as mosquito's), aren't they?

"At field-realistic levels of pollution, neonicotinoids and fipronil generally have negative effects on physiology and survival for a wide range of non-target invertebrates in terrestrial, aquatic, marine and benthic habitats"

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4284392/

* teeming

I had to reread it 3 times to work out what you meant.

teem, verb (gerund or present participle: teeming) be full of or swarming with. "every garden is teeming with wildlife"

team, verb (gerund or present participle: teaming) come together as a team to achieve a common goal. "he teamed up with the band to produce the disc"

Make mosquitoes extinct to make the area nicer for humans? Mosquitoes aren’t all bad: https://a-z-animals.com/blog/what-would-happen-if-mosquitoes...

This blog seems to be written by AI. It repeats itself several times content-wise in an unknowing fashion.

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