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We've done this lots[1] of[2] times[3] when it threatens agriculture, but when it threatens the lives of poor people in third world countries, suddenly we're worried about the ecosystem?

There will be an environmental impact, but it will be from hundreds of millions of humans not getting malaria and climbing their way out of property, not from the lack of mosquitoes in the ecosystem. It's still a significant problem, but our current solution of "let all the poor people die" is not a good one.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cochliomyia_hominivorax

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ceratitis_capitata

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anastrepha_ludens

Those eradications were paid for by the Department of Agriculture (and equivalent organizations in other regions). Who is going to pay for the mosquito?

I'm not objecting. I think we should eradicate the mosquito. But as someone who has worked for the government (albeit a different branch) I know that bureaucrats are not being evil or heartless when they don't allocate funds for necessary work that falls outside of their mandate: they could go to jail for misallocation of taxpayer funds. So whose mandate is this?

It's not really an apples to apples comparison. All of those are invasive species, except for the screw fly, which isn't a large part of a biological ecosystem (e.g. a sizeable portion of the Myotis lucifugus diet).
As someone who suffered the wrath of both malaria and dengue, I can't agree enough.
> There will be an environmental impact, but it will be from hundreds of millions of humans not getting malaria and climbing their way out of property, not from the lack of mosquitoes in the ecosystem. It's still a significant problem, but our current solution of "let all the poor people die" is not a good one.

Ecosystem-wise, let's not forget mosquitoes and their diseases are as much threat as they are content. Hawaii didn't have mosquitoes until the 19th century, they did a number on native bird populations. Mosquitoes negatively affect any species they feed on, not just humans.

You're comparing individual species with an entire family.

Countless animals rely on mosquitoes as a valuable food source. And before someone brings up the tired "mosquito predators all eat things besides mosquitoes" argument, people eat food besides grains. It doesn't mean we wouldn't still be 100% fucked if rice and wheat went extinct overnight.

You should definitely checkout - GEM mosquito control - if protecting environment is your real concern.

http://www.appropedia.org/GEM_mosquito_control

The main problem is how do we actually eradicate mosquito's without introducing other severely risks?

For example, one of the popular techniques is releasing genetically modified mosquitoes that are sterile. The problem is we don't know what could happen if/when these modified genes spread into the wider environment

It's a very serious concern, whether or not eradicating mosquitoes will introduce more severe problems

>There will be an environmental impact, but [...] not from the lack of mosquitoes in the ecosystem

Citation needed.

On reddit, I remember seeing something like "Research assures government that killing mosquitos would have no negative effect on world ecology"... right above another thread titled "Scientists underestimate ecological impact of species destruction"...

Do we actually understand Mosquitos role in the planet's eco system?

This is one of those ideas that sounds genius on its face, until it's actually implemented. Kudzu? Grows fast, prevents erosion, let's pay farmers to till it into the top soil. MTBE? Prevents engine knock, makes for cleaner air, let's mandate its use at the federal level. Whoopsie, once it's in the water we can't get it out, and its a carcinogen.

Let's kill all of the mosquitos because we find their presence unpleasant. Well, that's done and...oh, shit. Turns out there was a value to mosquitos after all. Anyone think to save some of that DNA?

Sometimes I wonder if the relentless human intervention in every aspect of nature will create or leave only life that has a value to people, like cows and wheat, or that which can resist domination or destruction by humans, like HIV, treatment-resistant bacteria, and the unassailable cockroach.

Perhaps after a period of rapid upheaval, humanity develops the technology to capture and control those super powerful flora and fauna, and use them for our own devices.

Then we can finally become Pokemon trainers.

Mosquitoes is not just about the macro-ecosystem. Blood sucking animals actually help micro-organism maintain their biodiversity by allowing DNA from very different environment to mixup. Killing mosquitos would be like killing bees (which we are).

Also you may think that most organism causing diseases are bad, but they can be actually useful in your own organism most of the time, and only trigger a disease once their population is out of control or when your body is not tuned correctly anymore.

Killing everything that seems to affect us in a bad way could snow ball into terrible consequences. Not to say I'm not glad that the plague is out of the picture, but everything is not "plague-level".

BTW: I have malaria. I hate mosquitos. I still believe we should not eradicate mosquitos.

I'm disappointed that the prevailing sentiment is applying the precautionary principle. We didn't create a technological civilization by being absolutely sure of all possible consequences before acting. That approach would have paralyzed us. Technology is a boon. It's done some harm, but a whole lot of good. Let's not throw up our hands and decide that we're no longer comfortable modifying our environment to suit us.
Eventually, a researcher who is genuinely responsible instead of merely professionally so will conduct the X-chromosome shredding experiment in the wild. There won't be publicity at first, but if it works as well as the Chickens Little fear then eventually, after the hymns of praise to the heavens have resounded for a few years, the researcher will reveal the key to a hash she had published years earlier. That hash will be found to be of her lab notes on the day she released the selfish gene into the wild and destroyed a scourge upon humanity for good.

Not only will this be good for the millions of human children who won't die, but we'll gain a better understanding of ecological principles at which we can now only guess. This isn't the last species we'll want to change, but there may only be a few we want to eliminate this way. The knowledge gained in the anti-Anopheles project will be useful for less destructive efforts as well.

I'm a vegetarian for spiritual reasons and also because I don't agree with causing suffering to other species.

If there's a fly in my room, buzzing on the window, I would open the window and let it fly away. If there's a big ant or a spider or a bee on my foot, I'd wait for it to explore me and then go on its way (although I'm scared of spiders and allergic to bee stings).

But even a hardcore flower sniffing fly kissing hippy like myself has his limit. And that limit is called The Mosquito.

I've sent so many bad vibes towards this species that they'd stopped biting me years ago. Even so, I still hate them for the sleepless nights and for the crazy, bad, aggressive thoughts that they've spawned inside my mind with their evil buzz.

One of the worst things about them is that it takes just one slap - 50 ms - to transform a living, buzzing mosquito into a bloody spot on the wall. They don't even have time to understand wtf has happened to them !

One moment she's like "Yeah! Who I should suck next?!" and next moment she's mush.

No pain, no regrets, no suffering. Nothing !

Yet I have to live with the memory of the suffering it has caused me my entire life.

Maybe we should design mosquitoes with more advanced nervous systems - optimized for feeling pain and suffering - and make their bodies more resistant and stronger, so that humans can torture them properly.

This "let's interbreed them with sterile males" sounds like a really soft and humane (?) punishment - give them lab grown mosquito studs so that those bloodsucking bitches can have a good sex life ? What kind of revenge is that ?

No! They must suffer !

Oh my, you see what thoughts they've spawned in me ? Otherwise, I'm pretty peaceful..

/humor

I remember reading some old tale about all the animals gathering to decide what to do about humanity. Every animal hated humans, so they all voted to destroy us. Except the mosquito, which was the only one to stand up for us because they needed food. The moral of the story was that in return for looking out for us, we should let mosquitoes drink what they need from us.

(not my story, I read it in a history book about India)

Seems like it would be relatively easy to preserve large captive populations of existing mosquito species, then kill everything in the wild. If we notice some tragic consequence, ctrl+z.
There's an excellent 20min Radiolab you can listen to that was released in 2014, explaining how the genetically modified male mosquitos work: http://www.radiolab.org/story/kill-em-all/

One (single) notable role mosquitos played was stopping early settlements from inhabiting and destroying much of the world's rainforests... "nature's Viet Cong".

Probably I'm biased because I had a dengue fever infection a few years ago, but I don't understand the commenters here. Humanity as a whole burns millions of tonnes of coal, manufacturing millions of tonnes of products which are just thrown away, releasing who knows what chemicals into the rivers and oceans, not to mention the radioactive waste. And seriously you are worried about killing mosquitos?
Sounds good, but afaik only a few mosquito species actually are spreaders of diseases affecting humans. I suppose I don't know if those pathogens can mutate to use other mosquitoes as hosts.

While we're at it, get rid of ticks.

I am astonished by the comments in this thread. Many people seem to assume that the chance of disaster as a result of wiping out mosquitoes is high - a sentiment I can only assume arises from having watched a lot of movies with the Arrogant And Foolish Scientist's Ill-Thought-Out Plan Backfires plot. It is good to think through consequences, but supposing that real world scientists acting deliberately and collaboratively will make the same mistakes that movie scientists make for the sake of drama - I find that a concerningly distorted perception of reality.

It's sort of like the people who react to robotics with concerns that the robots will go rogue and turn on their creators. Yeah, this is like a 90% probability event in movies, but that does not make it a reasonable thing to worry about in the real world.

Yeah, of course we should carefully think through the consequences before acting. That's what is happening. But if the mosquito experts say the ecological impact is likely to be negligible, then it probably will be. These guys are experts. Species go extinct all the time, and life goes on because it's pretty robust.

I'm not saying scientists are all knowing and can foresee all side effects, though I suspect if they are willing to state a view like that with confidence, they won't be far off. What I'm saying is the ZOMG BIRDS EAT MOSQUITOS and WHAT IF WE INFECT OURSELVES AND GET WIPED OUT talk is a little silly. Cool it there, Spielberg. ;)

We have a TON of mosquitos in the late spring through late autumn seasons. Those asian tiger mosquitos. They bite all day long. You can't go out and expect to avoid them unless you're doused in Off, and even then it's no guarantee.

Last year my daughter got bit so badly that both of her legs looked like she had a huge rash. It was just a string of mosquito bites combined with a sensitivity to them that exaggerated an already rough problem.

All that said, I'm not sure I'm pro-extermination. We have a lot of bats that come around and eat the mosquitos around dusk. I'm sure they'd find other things to eat, but I like seeing them skim the pool for a drink and then eat a few dozen skeeters while they dart around. I also don't like people playing god with this type of stuff. The butterfly effect is real, and if we exterminate them all, we won't know what the effect is until it's already too late. Realistically, the earth adapts to whatever we do to it. Long after we're gone, there will be tons of interesting life forms. That still doesn't make me any less uneasy about it.

I don't know.

For the purpose of disease control it's not strictly necessary to exterminate all mosquitos. Mosquito borne diseases are transmitted when a mosquito bites an infected person, becomes infected itself, and later bites another person. So long as mosquitos can be eliminated from the populated areas of a region, even if only for a couple of months, the infected mosquitos will die off, and the people infected with the diseases will eventually (hopefully) recover. By the time new generations of mosquitos reach these populated areas, they will no longer be infected, there will be no infected people for them to bite, and the disease will be eradicated.

Such a strategy might be more feasible than total extermination anyway since eliminating mosquitos in unpopulated regions would probably be the most expensive part of such a project due to the lack of infrastructure in those areas.

Of course, once the mosquitos return, you still have to deal with those annoying bites....

This article doesn't seem to know what the impact will be and doesn't seem to care.

Mosquitos are food for birds and bats. I think that talking to bird and bat biologists would be the best idea.

http://atlassociety.org/commentary/commentary-blog/3896-deat...

"What does it mean in practice to hold a philosophy that declares that pristine nature has intrinsic value in itself, and that regards Man and his activities as intrusive threats to the so-called ecological balance?

I have discussed the history, meaning, and basic premises of environmentalism previously, in my monograph The Green Machine and in my recorded talk "Green Cathedrals." I also explore these issues on my ecoNOT.com website.

But here I want to focus on the consequences of accepting core environmentalist premises—specifically, their deadly impact on human life."

Those who object to the eradication of mosquitoes are stating pretty clearly the value of human life according to their philosophy.

Interesting that this article shows up now, given that this one just poped up five days ago: http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/3284/what-if-we-era...
Do different species of mosquitoes interbreed? I'm guessing not, as this is the definition of "species".

If so, why do we care about the "ecological" impact of mosquito species that feed on humans? If anything, the ecosystem is unbalanced given the human population and the amount of mosquito food sources.

Most of the "whoops" tales are people that didn't listen to their scientists telling them not to, didn't have scientists at all, or were from long enough ago that we can discard their stories as irrelevant in the same way that we'd discard things like "spaceflight is impossible" and "nukes will end war". We've now traced the food chain around malaria mosquitoes out to three or four degrees of separation, including things like the diseases they carry. Their entire ecological niche is trivially replaced by close relatives that don't carry malaria. They're not even common enough to have major food-chain or crowding effects like you'd see with ants, rabbits, kudzu, or sparrows. Everything that we can find says that the damage from eradication would be zero. Not "small", or "manageable". None. They're small enough and unimportant enough that we should be thinking of them as disease organisms rather than insects. And I'm sure you're perfectly happy with the eradication of bot flies, polio, and smallpox. Reevaluate your beliefs.

Granted, we can never be certain about it. We're not deities, we're still limited by information theory and epistemology. But we're pretty damn sure. Way more than we need to be to go save half a million people a year.

I'm the only one not comfortable with the idea of wiping whole species just because we don't like them? I mean, I'm far fromthe Gaia thing, but what rights do we have to do that? And next? Rats, cockroaches? Hey, this specie of birds doesn't do anything useful and eat our fruits, why not killing them all?

Mosquitoes aren't even "responsible" for those diseases... Maybe we should invest in proactive body defenses against virus instead of just killing some random things.

Even if we just kill those mosquitoes species you know what? Nature evolves. Other mosquitoes and viruses will come. Do we kill them too?

This author clearly twists the words from that 2010 Nature report[1], as

1) That quote "Life would continue as before — or even better." is not even the conclusion in the Nature report. It's in the fifth paragraph of the first part out of the three part report. I guess this author just stopped here and failed to read the rest parts of the report for his conclusion?

2) The other two parts of the reports talk about the mosquito biomass and its impact to arctic tundra ecosystem, food chains and even cacao pollination.

3) The original author Janet Fang actually concluded the report by quoting entomologist Joe Conlon "If we eradicated them tomorrow, the ecosystems where they are active will hiccup and then get on with life." And the more important part is the next sentence: "Something better or worse would take over."

The key is that there is a high probability something worse would take over when you tried to mess Nature's arrangement in the past 100 million years abruptly. As noted by other HN user, Chairman Mao also thought getting rid of sparrows was really a good idea.

[1] http://www.nature.com/news/2010/100721/full/466432a.html

My friends in Ft. Lauderdale got a couple of CO2 "puffer" traps[1] and it really cut down the mosquito population and it was "chemical free". (caveat adding CO2 to the air I suppose) I was really impressed at how well they worked, my friend calls them the "fake cows". In the Bay Area I've never really had enough mosquito angst to try to build one. The basic idea is to lure them into range and then using a fan blow them into a bucket of sugar water. Something you could easily implement with an Arduino. That said, killing them with lasers[2] is pretty cool too.

[1] These are some examples, I am not endorsing these guys just found them for folks who were wondering what I was talking about -- https://www.megacatch.com/

[2] http://www.intellectualventures.com/inventions-patents/our-i... -- if only someone other than Intellectual Ventures had built it ...

Why do people think it's a good idea to kill off an insect that's a food source to thousands of other insects and animals?
Here's a thought. If the people who developed these things spent their own money to release them worldwide (yep, not just one continent) because they believe in the safety and importance of it... What would happen to them? And what would happen if they are right and it works great? Would the public really allow them to be punished? Would someone not reimburse them? They claim it's safe and are willing to risk the world, but not willing to risk their own livelyhood and reputation apparently.

If you believe in such a cause, and honestly believe the downside was zero, and you have the tool to do the job... What is holding you back? That's an honest question and I'd love to hear their responses.

This reminds me of GEM Mosquito control. I believe this is the only real eco friendly solution for mosquitoes menace. But corporates milking money out of mosquitoes control devices, won't let this be mainstream.

> GEM technology is a process of achieving sustainable mosquito control in an eco friendly manner by providing artificial breeding grounds utilizing common household utensils and destroying larvae by non-hazardous natural means such as throwing them in dry places or feeding them to larvae eating fishes.

Process in short - http://www.appropedia.org/GEM_mosquito_control#Modus_operand....

Wouldn't mosquito predators effectively die off as well? Birds, larger bugs, bats, etc.
Do we really know biological systems well enough to globalize code that nukes all X chromosomes in sperm? Maybe there are unknown mechanisms for cross-species sequence transfer. That could end up being quite the Darwin award ;)
There are other way to control the diseases. There's even a startup called AIME (http://www.aime.life) that focuses on using machine learning to predict the next mosquito borne disease outbreak. They claim to have pretty good accuracy too. The truth is though, that as the diseases mainly originate in "developing countries", no one seems care enough to even financially support them (not even YC). Still, they've made a lot of progress in the past months, even supporting the state of Sao Paulo in Brazil.
Whatever happened to those mosquito laser zappers? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BKm8FolQ7jw
The only comments I see here seem to be taking the the article literally, but I have a strong suspicion that it's largely a parody of the Trump/Cruz talk talk on the Middle East, ISIS, and Islam.

> The ugly situation on the ground does not call for Integrated Mosquito Management; it demands a program of Total Mosquito Destruction.

and

> we’re left to wait and watch swarms of evil on the wing, mating in midair, and landing on our shores. An enemy has made its way to the nation’s borders. Now is not the time for soft responses.

(and more)

Can we do this systematic?

First massive reduction, to test wether the Eco-System can handle it short term.

If yes, eradication until the diseases have vannished.

Measurement if the ecosystem handles it. Reintroduction if needed.

From the article: But New Yorkers, like everyone else in the United States, can take solace in two simple facts. The first is that Zika virus can’t easily be transmitted from one person to another

"Zika virus can be spread during sex by a man infected with Zika to his partners."

http://www.cdc.gov/zika/transmission/sexual-transmission.htm...

Is there any website/service that allows US citizens to sign and send a pre-written letter to their congressman to address this issue, specifically pertaining to the Zika Virus and/or killing mosquitoes? Change.org campaign?

My wife is pregnant now, we live in Southern California, and I feel fairly powerless to do anything except ask my wife to DEET up, be on the lookout for freestanding water, add screens, and pray.

Not strictly on topic, but the discussion of screwfly eradication made me think of [this brilliant and chilling short story][0].

[0]: https://lexal.net/scifi/scifiction/classics/classics_archive...

Next up is the "kissing bug" http://pvangels.com/news-mexico/176714/us-and-mexico-must-jo...

Possibly responsible for most heart failures in people under the age of 50.

Aside from the question of whether we should kill all mosquitoes, I question if we can. Is there really a pesticide that we can apply globally that kills all mosquitoes, but not huge swaths of other types of insects? And what is the cost of this--who is paying for this global campaign?
I realize this is blasphemy to some, but perhaps it's time to consider further use of DDT.