this post was submitted on 04 Jun 2024
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Mosquitos are pollinators.
Not every species are beneficial. There are only a handful that bite us and don't really contribute to the ecosystem. Those are the ones we need to get rid of.
I think you'd have to define beneficial..... Any species with sufficient biomass will become part of the surrounding ecology, with several other species adapting over time to predate upon that biomass.
Both tics and mosquitoes are huge sources of food for animals like birds, bats, fish, amphibians, and especially other insects. Completely destroying them would likely lead to an ecological disaster, just as it does when humans attempt to sanitize any aspect of nature.
The sanitizing process of urbanization is one of the largest reasons mosquito populations have exploded in North America in the last hundred years in the first place. Instead of mosquitoes laying eggs in ponds and waterways that are filled with frogs and fish that normally control their population. They are laying their eggs in urban environments that the animals who normally govern their population cannot thrive.
Idk man, I've lived in a tiny remote village of only a couple hundred people with no water, electricity, plumbing or roads and mosquitos would go insanely hard during the summer. It was the village my mother and grandmother grew up in and I had the privilege to experience it for a couple years. It sucked.
I've seen those nat geo docs in Africa as well of remote villages where they trap mosquitos yearly during the swarm and make parties out of them to eat.
Small sample size but I don't think urbanizing is helping them explode in numbers. It is killing their predators though, you're right but it's also killing them.
There have always been areas with large populations of mosquitoes, especially in warm wet climates around the equator. However in the last hundred years they have been utilizing urbanization to spread further north and south, mainly because cities lack biodiversity and have offer almost unlimited food Sources
Nobody wants to exterminate all mosquitoes. Just the ones that bite humans.
I don't think that specificality really affects the argument. Any effort to reduce a significant amount of biomass is going to have untold amounts of consequences on an ecological scale.
Whether that's beneficial or not depends on who you're talking about.
Relevant rabbit holes for the lazy:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Butterfly_effect
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaos_theory
We don't understand the intricacies of any ecosystem nearly enough to start engineering it. Pull one thread, and you might unravel the tapestry.
We wipe out thousands of species every year through pollution alone, what's one more to add to the pile?
Not all mosquitoes bite humans. If you exterminated the biting ones, the non-biting ones would just fill that same ecological niche.
Mosquitoes are the only natural predators of humans. If you mess with the delicate ecosystem, humans will procreate uninhibited and exhaust their resources, leading to a far worse fate. It's kinder to just leave the mosquitoes be, and let nature run its course.
The males don't bite, but the females need that sweet protein from blood to grow the next generation. Exterminating all the females (the biting ones) would end the whole population.
The non-biting variety are called "blind mosquitoes" or "midges". Their females don't suck blood.
Not cosmopolitan mosquitoes