this post was submitted on 10 Jul 2024
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It's bizarre to me. We do so much carelessly, but here we're being extra careful? 600,000 people die of malaria every year. A delay of one day means 1,600 people die.
There's quite a huge domino effect in the food chain if we would cause mass extinction to mosquitoes as they are the food for many species of birds which are then food for the next thing and so on.
I'm no expert but what I've heard is that there are lots of mosquitoes that don't bite which are more important for the food chain, but the ones that do bite make up a super small part so if we only eliminated the biting species there would still be plenty of other non-malaria-carrying mosquitoes for the food chain.
At least that's the theory.
Surely something else could be encouraged to fill in the gap? Would love to see more fireflies.
Well in theory yes. However there are billions upon billions of mosquitos and therefore, despite their small size, they are a large bio-mass.
If we try and remove a large bio-mass like that from the ecosystem there's bound to be knock-on effects in the food chain. We need to be sure that gap does get filled and what would fill that gap doesn't have any effects that could be worse than Malaria i.e. an insect that could swarm and cause famine.
Oh like a plague of locus? Interesting, so the people that are introducing infertile mates into the swarm have they evaluated such risk?
I'm no expert in biology, not my science as I dropped it after highschool, so I'm not going to pretend I know much, I'm merely hypothesising.
But I do know that removing large parts of bio-mass from the ecosystem will have consequences that need to be considered.
As far as I've read about sterile mosquito introduction is that it's an attempt at population reduction not extermination. I'm guessing this will allow the experts in this field to study the effect this effort has on mosquito populations, malaria rates, and other insect and mosquito predator populations.
Also our understanding of biology has come on leaps and bounds and I expect that within the next 50 years (barring a catastrophic event that impacts humanity) we'll have much more control over the ecosystem and I hope that allows us to improve human life and be better stewards of the environment.
Iirc part of the reason for sterile releases is to shift the populations. So for example they release them for malaria-carrying sub-populations but leave intact clean populations to fill in the niche.
There’s also some experimentation with releasing fully fertile specimens that have a specific gut bacteria which makes them unable to carry some of the diseases impacting humans, and is passed down to the young.
Are there species of anything that their sole source of food is mosquitos?
The only ones concerned about malaria deaths are also concerned about the ecosystem. The people who are not concerned about the ecosystem are also not concerned about malaria deaths.