Since when are we concerned with causing mass extinctions?
this post was submitted on 10 Jul 2024
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When CCP did a controlled eradication of pest animals destroying their crops, it caused the great Chinese famine and millions died. Mostly because these pest animals were natural enemies to even worse pests.
Although the sparrow campaign ended in disaster, the other three anti-pest campaigns may have contributed to the improvement in the health statistics in the 1950s.[18]
Seems the birds may have been the only screw up. No harm reported from the mosquitos, flies, and rats.
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Yea, those misquitos are trying to rid us of the human pest, but it's just too damn tenacious and pernicious!
As far as I can tell, if it had been Three Pests instead of including sparrows, it would have been fine.
Since it would drastically affect our ability to survive!
Wait...
Nevermind.
We can't. There are effective population controls though.
Ticks on the other hand could disappear entirely and nothing would be impacted negatively. They're useless parasites.
Just exterminate the ones that bite humans. The non-biting ones will fill that ecological niche, and then you're good to go.
Opossums would be very sad to see ticks go.
That's been disproven.
Chickens?
Don't need ticks, chickens will eat just about anything
Including each other
Chickens are vicious lil dinosaurs
It was a sobering moment wandering around the farm supply store and finding chicken "anti-cannibalism spray."
Ticks are bad, but have utility for scientists in seeing if predators of smaller animals have gone out of control in an area.
Not enough utility. Death to ticks!
At the risk of derailing the conversation, if you haven't seen The Last Wish, do yourself a favour.
If you've seen the first Puss In Boots and was dissuaded, give this a chance.
The animation is Spiderverse tier, the theming and context of the movie is very much not for children.
If you need convincing, take four minutes to watch this clip of Puss meeting >!death!<
Well now I'm intrigued
I'm curious to know what you think after watching.
Seconded.
There are only a few species of mosquitoes that pose a threat to humans (and several thousand that don't). If we had a way to effectively eradicate those few species, then it probably wouldn't have major consequences. They don't fill an important, unique niche in their ecosystems like, say, bees.
But we don't have a way to do that. Not without huge collateral damage from poisons and the like. There's been some promising work with genetic engineering, releasing mosquitoes that will mate and produce non-viable offspring. This can greatly reduce a local population in the short-term, but they bounce back.
This can greatly reduce a local population in the short-term, but they bounce back.
Not necessarily, all attempts/experiments done so far have been intentionally limited. If we simply throw the dial to 11 and just absolutely flooded the areas it might have a much more long term impact and possibly eradication
The US entirely eliminated screwworms within its border in a very similar fashion 60 years ago and then wiped them off the whole continent just for good measure: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Olj8arvfYj4
If we actually directed effort at exterminating harmful mosquitos, they would be gone in a couple years.
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.
Last year my bathroom would have 2-3 of them buzzing around every night when I went in there. This year I left a bucket of pine sol water in there a few weeks ago after cleaning and no mosquitoes except the shitload of dead ones in that bucket. Do with that information what you will.
I had them inside too every winter. Finally realized I should drayno the absolute fuck out of my shower and all gone. I hope they had to watch each other die.
All other mammals: Will you guys hurry up and do something already?! We suffer too!!
"Destroy this nature!"
Humans: you're about to see what's called a pro gamer move
Srsly fuck those little demons
I read a journal about a father and son walking through Canada a long time ago and watching a swarm of mosquitoes take down a bull Moose
There are hundreds of mosquito species, and only a couple dozen decided to evolve into little bastards. Let's give them hell
Begun... these Mosquito Wars have.
Mosquitos are one of the most prolific pollinators
Human bitting mosquitos are not pollinators.
But are we capable of only wiping out the human biting mosquitos without affecting other mosquitos, or even other insects?
Same way we get boll weavils.
Sterilize a ton of mosquitoes, release them into the wild, and have them compete against fertile ones. Over time, the population decreases.
Pollinators of what?
Blood for the blood god..
Never used to get bit in the UK but something I can't quite put my finger on has allowed them to exist now.
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Biting mosquotes can and do spread diseases. Knowing only a few species are a such, please hurry up trimming a few actually bad leaves from the tree-of-life... But not with "dump forever poison everywhere" method the last gens did... (And are still doing sadly)