The small section of mosquitoes that bite humans actually don’t serve a critical niche like that, and just spread disease. Why the idea has been floated at sterilizing them.
How do you define “wasp” though? All Hymenoptera? All Apocrita? All Apocrita minus Apoidea and/or Formicidae? All Vespoidea (minus Formicidae?)? Only Vespidae?
What about all the parasitic wasps? All fig trees would die and with them whole food webs. And if all the parasitic wasps that hold other organisms in check would die, this would also lead to a total disruption of so many biomes…
Ok but I still think the mosquito thing is worth a try. I’m even willing to live alongside wasps but mosquitoes gotta go!
The mosquito thing is known to be false, and people only ever talk about extinguishing half a dozen species of them at most, that are invasive on most parts.
Half a dozen out of 6k+ lmao
I’m willing to pump up other insects to get rid of mosquitoes
Then do what you can to promote dragonflies.
(Don’t know how to better link this old comment.)
https://photon.lemmy.world/post/lemmy.world/19193004?thread=0.12060765.12088433
tl;dr: Just read it.
Can I be an insect?
…🥺
👉👈::bonk::
We’ll pump you full of larvae
I’m prepping my ovipositors as we speak
Explain humans. Checkmate, scientists!
Humanity is the CEO of earth.
Counterpoint: animals which are clearly not intelligently designed, like pandas and horses
@fossilesque all I ask is for the specific mosquito species to go extinct that carry the dangerous version of malaria and dengue
What about ticks?
I’m sure they somehow contribute to the stability, but I try so hard to ignore it.
It’s spring (your hemisphere may vary) and time to set out tick tubes!
Tick tubes are cardboard tubes stuffed with cotton fluff soaked in permethrin. Mice use the cotton to make nests. The permethrin kills ticks on the mice, reducing the tick load of the area. It doesn’t hurt the mice, and is much more targeted than just spraying the whole yard for insects.
As long as these creatures leave me the fuck alone they can stick around
Roaches? What?
Smoking roaches gets you high.
And that’s important to the nitrogen cycle?
Yeah, if the nitrogen cycle wants to get stoned
There are thousands of species of cockroach on earth, and like a dozen that can be invasive in human homes. It’s okay to kill the invasive ones, there wouldn’t be as many of them in as many places without us anyway.
How many species of birds and bats eat just mosquitoes though, or a high enough percentage that they would go extinct rather than shift to rely more on their other prey species, even if at a smaller population? And are those particular species of birds and bats worth the consequences of having mosquitoes?
Which would maybe force some other animals to change their behaviour slightly more, which in turn affects yet other species. And so the butterfly effect rolls on.
Or it doesn’t and the system stabilises in another state. Who knows, can we actually know it with a high enough certainty or are the dependencies and behavioural guesses too complex?
I mean, has the system ever not eventually stabilized in another state? The fact that we have had extinctions, quite a lot of them even involving most species that have ever existed, and yet complex life and ecosystems still exist, would suggest that life will find a way to adapt around such a loss given time.
i am under the impression that mosquitos, as an invasive species, do not fill an important ecological niche and could go extinct and be replaced by other insects
I think that’s true for the Aedes egypti species at least, they’re not native in the Americas and are a main disease-spreading species
Invasive where? They can’t be invasive in general
They’re invasive of the PLANET
I think in Lilo and Stitch the aliens mention in passing that they use Earth as a wildlife preserve for mosquitoes.
My back patio, the little shits
Aedes aegypti and Aedes albopictus are invasive in all of North and South America
Many of the most common species of mosquitos in america are invasive
They’re invading my personal space
This has been a common sentiment but it hasn’t been proven in any substantial way to my knowledge. I personally doubt it’s accurate. That’s not to say the entire ecosystem would collapse but there would likely be consequences.
That said, the other commenter is correct that there are many introduced mosquito species that could probably be eradicated from their non-native range without major ecological harm. And the species that are the worst pests in human cities tend to be introduced, so eliminating them might significantly reduce the level of bites and disease transmission for people.
Mosquitos are a nuisance to every mammal, I think if we could talk to animals this is how it would go down
Human: “So anyways we’ve been mulling over making the mosquito extinct, but it might have some consequences for yo…”
Mammals: “WTF BRO YOU COULD HAVE DONE THAT THE ENTIRE TIME! WHY TF ARE YOU STILL HERE GET RID OF THOSE FUCKERS!”
Yeah I mean the ethics of how humans relate to wild mammals are so complicated and confusing that I’m not even going to go there.
TBF humans historically have been pretty lax in doing anything simply because it was a good thing to do
There are many types of mosquitoes, but only a few suck blood. It’s the bloodsuckers they’re talking about when they say no one would miss them.
…and if humans went extinct all species would benefit.
except dogs or animals that rely on humans
I can tolerate most pests, even cockroaches, but I draw the line at bedbugs. Don’t care if they have any purpose, just fuck them
The sun has a purpose, and it can easily kill you. Merely having a purpose doesn’t make that purpose useful or without dangers.
That’s usually the case, but it’s just not true for mosquitos. Entomologist quoted in this Nature article:
“If we eradicated them tomorrow, the ecosystems where they are active will hiccup and then get on with life. Something better or worse would take over.”
