The technology to eradicate mosquito-borne disease exists

may? it already has - tiger mosquitoes are already noted in Europe, and deaths due to dengue are being reported (in very less numbers, but still)

I think when you're inside all time time, it's harder to care about stuff outside - climate change, but also things like pollution and walkability.

If we eliminated human-biting mosquitoes, how much of a positive effect would it have through people just interacting and caring about the outdoors more?

> They may be playing some unknown role in some unknown ecosystem, which no scientist or researcher said is necessary

Let me fix this for you real quick. They ARE playing a MAIN role in MANY KNOWN ecosystems and EVERY Biologist know this and SAID this for AGES.

Denying Ecology, a branch of the science called Biology, is like denying Physics or claiming that nobody understand Maths. If we want to have an adult conversation we should stop repeating "nah nah nah, I can't hear you".

Biologists aren't stupid, just annoying. We painfully studied, classified, and tortured other humans with the description of each little bug and each little blade grass, since the period of the painted caves at least. We may miss that a penguin species are two identical penguin species, but we would not miss a species that canalize so much energy through the system as mosquitoes do. This is one of the most researched species in the history and its role in ecosystems is REAL and has been proven.

Can we, please, just accept the truth and move on with this conversation?

We do know that mosquitoes are a key species, and we have witnessed many times in human history that ecosystems will predictably collapse in unpredictable ways when a key species vanish. We know that a different animal will quickly fill the vacuum with UNPREDICTABLE, UNFIXABLE, and PERMANENT consequences

Remember when a small cute furry animal from Asian steppes invaded the planet and killed people left and right? Remember how much money we must burn today because rats?.

Mao tried the same, promoted new plagues, and millions of Chinese died of famine for it. How many people would starve if freshwater fisheries vanish overnight?. Even worse, what if the animal replacing mosquitoes connect us with new diseases that our bodies never evolved to fight, exactly as rats did?.

We should apply an electrified and double barbed wired Chesterton's Fence here, because messing with ecosystems at this scale is reckless. This ranks among the same grade as nuclear stuff.

Doesn't seem to be true, or based on anything.

> More or Less were unable to find any source for the original figure aside from works which made the claim without reference.

https://www.realclearscience.com/blog/2019/10/03/has_malaria...

(I don't know what the Amazonian frog eats; my point is that biotopes are complex and second- and third-order effects need to be monitored. That's why smaller interventions - e.g. making humans poisonous to mosquitoes, pushing them to the evolutionary path of avoiding humans - would be better than whole eradication.)

https://store.photonmatrixlab.com/

Get a 5 gallon bucket, add water/grass/leaves/dunk and let it sit for a few weeks. Every few weeks add more dunks. Put a stick in there so small animals don't get stuck when trying to get a drink.

They're not evil, they have zero idea about the consequences of their actions. I think this viewpoint is why people are hesitant to just make things go instinct because people don't like them. Yes there might be good scientific / humanitarian reasons for it, but mosquitoes "being evil" isn't one of them.

I'd be much more concerned about the changes humans do to our ecosystems that we know cause harm, but aren't stopping (like filling the atmosphere with CO2 and other greenhouse gases) than about changes that would, almost certainly, reduce harm and have only extremely unlikely and hypothetical risks.

Mostly because the rich world eradicated a lot of them to stop malaria.

Of course, once we were safe we told the rest of the world they had to live (and die) with with malaria, because we had discovered environmentalism.

Once a male mates with a female, the females eggs are already fertilized, so the presence of normal male mosquitoes doesn't matter...as long as the genetically modified mosquitoes considerably outnumber the normal male mosquitoes.

> White-nose syndrome (WNS) is a fungal disease killing hibernating bats in North America. The fungus, named Pseudogymnoascus destructans (or Pd for short) likely originated in Europe or Asia. Sometime in the early 2000's Pd arrived in North America and attacked vulnerable bat species, resulting in unusual and large die-offs of bats first observed in New York in 2006. Since then, the disease has spread to most US states and Canadian provinces, leaving millions of dead bats in its path. WNS causes high death rates and fast population declines in the species affected by it.

https://www.nps.gov/articles/what-is-white-nose-syndrome.htm

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White-nose_syndrome

Joking aside, the consensus seems to be that the effect of removing disease-carrying mosquitoes (not all mosquitoes) from the environment is minor compared to how many lives it can save.

If 20,000 humans weren't significantly harmed from disease because of this release, but 70,000 frogs faced starvation, which would you choose?

A billion human lives, or some sad trout who have to eat fruit flies instead. For me, it’s an obvious choice.

I just can’t understand the level of smugness it must take to insist that we must force another billion people to die of horrible diseases like malaria, because you want the moral high ground. How do you even tell yourself that killing all those people is the moral high ground?

In Europe though, where aedes aegypti didn't exist 20 years ago, it's probably the other way around: what did the introduction of this new species damage? (apart from making the summer unbearable outside if any of your neighbour isn't very strict with standing water elimination)

I don't get the "but what if it's somewhat - not infinitely - bad" argument? The known good is so dramatically good that we'd need a shocking amount of unknown bad to have made it not worth it. But if I'm choosing between mosquitoes, and say... fish, frogs, and a variety of birds, yes, get rid of the mosquitoes.

Larvicides can still be a thing though. No benefit in keeping those around.

If it's one-and-done, everywhere on Earth (eg smallpox), it can work. If it drags on for decades or isn't rolled out globally (eg malaria) then it won't work.

It has been used to suppress screw worm in the United States for decades until the administration cut the funding.

These are almost always a temporary solution that need constant funding and seasonal releases to work. The populations will surge back as soon as it's stopped.

In general, you have to weigh the irreversible cost of unintended consequences with the irreversible cost of known human death from mosquitoes.

We could in one stroke take half of what multi-billionaires and quasi-trillionaires have hoarded. If they didn't have personal accountants, they wouldn't even notice it, as they have far more money than what they manage to burn through - and we would have the means to "choose" to solve real problems affecting hundreds of millions of people.

Anyway since they kill north of half a million folks yearly and infect couple of hundred millions as official minimums, I am more than happy with some other species of small insects take their empty spot. Of course not everybody cares much about poor folks dying quietly half around the world, but some do. One of very few benefits of global warming is the migration of these bastards more north so rich folks in US and Europe will have more personal stake in this topic rather than usual 'oh that's so horrible, next'.

Some minor re-adjustement of ecosystem is more than fine, anyway we do it constantly for rather pathetic reasons if any. I would add ticks, all forms, to the effort.