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A community for comrades to chat and talk about whatever doesn't fit other communities
Anyone who's from the Global South will want them extinct, me included.
As for the pollinator thing, if we're going through the effort to eradicate all mosquitos, we can put the same effort towards breeding and releasing replacements that don't spread malaria, dengue and all the other horrible ailments that these things spread. They are the number one killer of humans besides humans, this alone seals it for me.
They already do massive mosquito control in some areas of the world and the impact to local wildlife is null. They don't pollinate anything that isn't also pollinated by other insects. There are in fact many similar insects that fill the void left when mosquitoes disappear, and those insects don't spread diseases. Those same insects become food for creatures in place of the mosquitoes as well. Idk about eliminating ALL mosquito varieties ever but I do support culling a great many of them.
I get the feeling that the only people who think mosquitos shouldn't be eradicated are those who didn't have to suffer through several terrible summers dealing with them. Take any one of these lucky people and make them spend a week in sub-Saharan Africa in July, I'd expect their tune to change.
I do see where some of them are coming from at least. Humans do have a history of really fucking shit up. It's like the one thing humans excel at naturally. Lol. I think people are looking at like we would do so many other times where not enough research and proper implementation is planned. I only support this because we do have quite a bit of data already on it and additionally only supporting it being carried out in the most thorough and well researched manner possible.
Also yeah, coming from the extremely humid and uncontrolled areas of the US I fucking cannot stand mosquitoes. I legitimately cannot imagine what it's like in areas where malaria is a real threat. I get why you would be ready to see them gone. lol
And it's not just the constant itching and irritation. Ask if they'd feel the same way if their extended family's risk of contracting Dengue Fever was >0 and their access to treatment for it <0. Amazingly, your attitude to mosquitoes changes when you have friends and family that are dead because of them.
I wholeheartedly agree with your sentiment as a global south citizen! Life is different with mosquitoes around. And it's not a good kind of different.
Woah, haven't seen you around in a while, glad you're still with us
How can I leave my COMRADES!
With y'all till the end of time!
I live in a place where the mosquitoes are so bad I can't go outside at night. Have a mosquito net over the bed. Hate them so much that yeah I would snap fingers and delete that genetic code from the pool in an instant..
Same. I have all my windows covered with a mosquito net because otherwise I'd have them lurking around everywhere. Hate those bloodsuckers.
Hate those bloodsuckers.
Don't we all?
Humans have an awful record of shortsightedness and unforeseen consequences. While yes, mosquitoes have the highest humam kill rate of any other thing that can kill people, it can be mitigated or eliminated with adequate sanitation and healthcare access for communities being harassed by mosquitoes.
The better solution to the ails caused by these insects is to improve drainage and sanitation infrastructure, build hospitals and clinics, and enact policy which gives access to this infrastructure to everyone without exception.
We have exterminated parasites before, why can’t we do it again? I don’t see many people going up to bat for the Guinea Worm. Also all of that is wonderful and all, but natural land features such as wetland, swamps, floodplains, and river deltas prevent that from working.
What are you going to do? Drain a wetland or pour kerosene into it and cause devastating damage to the local ecosystem and human population? Well that’s the only way to contain mosquitos naturally.
Let's get rid of those pesky sparrows while we're at it 💀
There are thousands of species of mosquitoes that don’t suck blood or spread disease. The most prominent 10 cause the vast majority of the destruction, and are much more valid targets then a random bird that Mao gathered peasants militias to kill.
Seems like the issue is invasive species, a problem caused by people, rather than mosquitoes as a whole.
Removing all invasive mosquitoes is just cleaning up our mistakes and a lot less morally worrying than killing all mosquitoes just because they’re harmful to us. Of course getting rid of them because they’re harmful to us is somewhat valid, but getting rid of invasive mosquitoes is a good compromise anyways.
The problem here isn’t invasive mosquitos, it’s just that those invasive species have exacerbated the problem 10 fold as they are better breeders, more aggressive, larger, and more hardy then other mosquitos.
The problem still remains even if all of those magically disappear.
Also I see nothing morally wrong will valuing human life over an insect with limited to practically no impact in its habitants and niche.
I don't know shit about mosquitoes and therefore do not feel qualified to comment on it. Like, fuck mosquitoes, but don't they still have an ecological niche? But I'm sure people smarter than me have accounted for that, so... All I know is "Mosquito yucky :("
primarily, it's niche is basically being biomass to be eaten by other animals
Not really even, they act as an incredibly small portion of many animals diets (for example they’re around 4-8% of bat diets as opposed to a much higher percentage for flies). They are really just to small to provide any meaningful nutrient or caloric intake.
Oh God I just got back from a trip to Alaska and I must have at least 50 mosquito bites 😭
No, but we should try to eradicate the diseases that come from them. Exception for invasive mosquito species, we can get rid of them.
Eradicating the diseases without eradicating the mosquitos is close to impossible, the vast majority of the diseases carried by mosquitoes require mosquitoes to complete their life cycle, such as malaria.
Secondly, diseases such as Yellow Fever rank among diseases such as HIV, and Chickenpox for being incurable and extraordinarily difficult to research treatments for, due to their structure and nature of attack.
Why start taking down a Jenga tower from the top? Wasting time and resources, when you could take it out from the bottom in one fell swoop.
Aren't scientists testing alterations to mosquito populations to see if this is possible?
This is more or less the same research, and they are doing both simultaneously. They're just seeing which option is more viable, safe, and successful.
As someone who hates mosquitoes and as someone who has been kept up all night because of them, I have to say no. They are pollinators and serve as food for many other species. Plus humans don't have the greatest track record in overseeing all possible consequences of their environmental actions.
What we could do, though, is strive for sufficient medical care in areas affected by mosquito born diseases.
Mosquitos are not primary pollinators and preform a very small percentage of the total pollinations. Significantly less then bees or flies.
They also don’t serve as a good food source, the studies of bats eating mosquitos were faulty and downright fraudulent.
Mosquitos are a threat and serve to much a danger compared to their minuscule benefit.
Maybe. I know too little of the subject to be calling for outright extinction of an entire species of insects.
I do find it interesting to see how the subject of mosquitoes divided a communist internet board.
It’s people who have seen the failures of capitalist profit based conservation/extermination efforts, and don’t believe that that can be done positively with the backing of science.
Basically they don’t trust the system to effectively do this without fucking up, and I don’t blame them. But having studied this and seen the effects of mosquitos firsthand, ever single last one of those bloodsuckers should go to hell.
The Asian Tiger Mosquito is by far the worst.
I guess living in Western Europe, where they are no more than a minor annoyance, has impacted my vision of how problematic these creatures are.
Precisely. Many argue this issue from their places of privilege in the Global North when all they have seen of mosquitos is them being little annoyances.
700 million people are infected on average with deadly diseases transmitted by mosquitoes each year, and roughly 1 million of them die.
The things that mosquitos can do are nightmarish. I have seen half of a village wiped out by infections with Yellow fever, with people writhing and suffering with seizures and pain as doctors try their best to kill the pain with morphine, but it’s no use, there is no treatment or cure for Yellow Fever. or a family hearing that their loved ones have all passed away. Why? Because they got unlucky, and were killed by one bite. Children with Dengue, elderly grandmothers with malaria whose organs will simply give out under the fever, infants that get Chik Fever and will be crippled for their whole lives as the virus destroys their joints and bones.
Only those that have not seen children in body bags will argue mosquitos should not be eradicated.
Yes. All bloodsuckers should be removed from this plane of existence. It is the luxury of the western academic to make noises and murmur in displeasure masturbatory philosophical thought experiments against it while it is the realm of the poor and animals with far more feeling and ability to experience pain and suffering to experience the actual reality. Fuck em. If they didn't want to go extinct they should have adapted the evolutionary strategy of not being a mass-murdering parasite responsible for murdering hundreds of millions of the apex predator with big brains and just generally being annoying, unpleasant, and a continual disease vector threat.
Not to say it will be easy. It'll be one of the most challenging things humans ever do. It will likely require unified (or at least cooperative) communist party rule over at least 90% of the planet, large amounts of funding, and a complex plan.
Though things like ChatGPT are largely a scam I believe we are just socialist leadership away from something incredible in terms of artificial intelligence (combined with quantum computing). A lot of problems can kind of just be brute forced by just doing a lot of math, simulations, etc. Once you truly understand biology at its most basic levels plus its interactions you can simulate and create molecules, compounds, etc that interact with that biology with a goal in mind. Humans could never do this in any reasonable time-frame, but a super-massive quantum computing complex could do many things from creating drugs to treat diseases and cancers to improving industrial processes, to yes, synthesizing things to effect the removal of certain organisms.
Best of all this plan is far more plausible and feasible than nonsense like moving away from them or somehow geo-engineering earth completely out of climate change into a very cold climate that somehow still supports crops, animal and plant life, etc.
Annoying people who I don't care for say things like they fill certain niches outside of bloodsucking and to that I say, evolution will re-fill those niches once they are gone. Things go extinct from time to time, others prosper, if there are minor consequences then we shall take charge of and accept them. It is purely delusional thinking on the part of liberal minded types who believe in some butterfly effect destabilizing our entire biosphere as a result of a change like this. Fact is our planet and the biosphere we know including organisms we're familiar with has undergone a lot of challenges and changes including extinctions caused by humans as well as population decreases, increases, climate shifts, displacement of habitats by human industry, civilization, habitats, and lots and lots of pollution. Not to mention natural things like droughts, diseases, minor climate shifts, introduction of species that out-compete others from other regions, etc. These people just hesitate to take the wheel. They seem to be very religious in thinking nature sacred and that man can only muck it up. They're anti-humanists and should not be paid heed.
Spoiler: Other species will fill the niches of mosquitoes with time. Evolution is quite good at that. People acting like it will lead to ecological collapse are losers who should be bullied.
Mosquitos were devastated by DDT back in the day and on the back-foot with one foot in the grave. I'm unaware of any mass extinctions as a result.
The biologists may study the world, Marxists seek to change it. Not to remove all species or anything of the sort but to tweak things. We've already made too many changes and more are required for human survival. So either be honest and advocate in a vicious nihilistic fashion for human self-extinction (to preserve the purity of nature as these types see it, with man seen as contaminated which is a very Abrahamic fall of man type nonsense thinking and/or mystical woo-woo, animism energy nonsense when you get right down to this thought process IMO) or sit down and accept that some things need to be done even if they make you feel a little sad.
Smallpox was a virus. WAS. We did that. NOT sorry. It shouldn't have fucked around. Someday it would be nice to see "Mosquitos were" "Ticks were", "lice were".
People accuse this type of thinking I advocate for of having a god-complex but they betray their own primitive biases by invoking that. As if only gods may order or change things. As if what is must always be. As if what we found ourselves in is sacred and to change it is to blaspheme. As if humankind has no right to change the conditions it finds itself in. Go back in time and kidnap a human from 9000 years ago, bring them here then them about our orderly hectares of crops all neatly carved into the land stretching beyond sight, ask them about our towers of steel which defy the gods to soar into the heavens, ask them about our airplanes which likewise defy the gods, ask them about our treatments for lost limbs (prosthetics) which likewise defy the will of the gods, ask them about our defibrillators, about surgery, and now tell me these people who raise this point are not just a continuation of that same backwardness cloaking it in other more modern sounding excuses.
Maybe a tad forceful in the rhetoric but I agree with your assessment of the issue. I don't think we should bully people but rather give them a clearer picture as to the reality of what most impoverished people have to live with on the day to day. Most users here for example are from the US or Europe, where mosquitos and the diseases they carry aren't anywhere near as prevalent, and I get that impression from reading many of the comments here. Maybe they had bad experiences on occasion, an unpleasant vacation, or a particularly bad summer. But most of them will never see the reality of how in many African nations, Malaria is the leading cause of death. We shouldn't blame them for their lack of understanding, but rather help educate them.
If we could use quantum computing to make a perfectly designed genetic method of mosquito elimination, couldn’t we just change their behavior to be less harmful instead? Why would we kill them when we have the ability to modify their molecular structure like putty? Why not just make them live out the rest of their days in peace after making them only capable of digesting nectar?
Given that mosquitoes hurt a lot of people, I support the general idea, but once we have super advanced magic adjacent technology, we could bypass any moral concerns entirely
Mosquitoes are very common wherever I've lived, and I must say this sounds like a bad idea. Rather than investing in ways to reduce mosquito populations through well known social methods (garbage collection and regular inspections for instance), we're now asked to put our faith in a brand new science-y technique with unforeseeable future ecological consequences under the promise that this time it'll definitely make all mosquitoes extinct. Not only is this ecologically very short-sighted, but also tangential to the realities of the regions most affected by mosquitoes which are poor or rural areas with limited access to health services or waste disposal. I have a hard time believing that every mosquito from Europe to inner Brazil would be affected by this gene edit in such a short timeline, and I'd wait until such extinction is reproduced in some form in a closed lab setting before putting any hopes on it. But if the go-ahead is inevitable, I'd recommend starting by the Aedes agypti before going for all of them.
Have saved the video for later but my gut says they probably play a crucial role in how the ecosystem is balanced despite how annoying they are and deleting them completely will disrupt it with cascading effects.
Not really in full honesty, in fact they are invasive in a large amount of ecosystems. Case in point the Asian Tiger Mosquito that is so aggressive that it is driving native mosquitos extinct.
If they go extinct, then Earth will lose its protected status!
In seriousness, it would be nice to not have mosquitoes, but it could have environmental impacts as other commenters have already discussed.
I only took a quick skim through the video until after work, but my initial impressions are no. As far as I am aware there are thousands of species of insects that fall under the term "mosquito". Making thousands of species extinct is going to have catastrophic ecological results. I know some are pollinators and surely they must be a major food source for some animals.
I don't love them either, but we probably can't just eliminate them safely. I would say we could just move somewhere without them, but I don't think we would all fit in Iceland.
They are neither primary pollinators or good food sources.
Good video, tho I have to say we probably shouldn’t do it. They say in the vid that mosquitoes are a Pollinator, and seeing as how we have fewer native pollinators in many regions around the globe, making one of those extinct most likely wouldn’t do us any favors. The vid says an organism could potentially take its place, but hoping for one is far from knowing that one will appear. The risks seem to outweigh the benefits imo, but something absolutely must be done about the rapid spread of Malaria, which is especially prevalent among the global South
They preform an extremely small percent of pollinations, and it is a very faulty premise.