Read this story first, please: https://www.quora.com/If-mosquitoes-were-in-danger-of-extinc...

> Within a month we destroyed the mosquito population. We could actually go outside in short sleeves again. We were very, very happy.

> It didn’t take long to notice the change in the ecology, however. Being in a rural area we had a large amount of diverse animals and birds. When the mosquitoes went, all the birds went too. Not a few birds, not just the song birds, but all the birds. We created our own “silent spring”. The bats and dragonflies also went away and with them many of the fish in the lake became more voracious and desperate to eat, which meant that they were much easier to catch. In a short time the lake was fished out. And because all the birds were gone we got a tick explosion. Instead of mosquitoes we now have ticks everywhere. It’s annoying to be constantly pulling off ticks, checking for ticks and finding ticks attached to one’s genitals. In addition, there have been a number of cases of Lyme disease as a result.

...

> The Law of Unintended Consequences is a very powerful law. You may be attempting to do something good over here but the result is an unforeseen and negative change in the infrastructure over there. It’s funny now how we get together outside and notice how dead we’ve made the area by killing all the mosquitoes. It looks beautiful, just like the environment looks OK in Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring”, beautiful to look at, but devoid of life, devoid of sound and requiring constant laundry, showering and tick checks. It’s extremely disheartening to come into the house and finding a tick attached to your genitals. And although we cannot attribute it to our killing of the mosquitoes, the leech population has exploded in the lake as well. Maybe the loss of all the fish that ate the mosquitoes and leeches allowed the explosion of the leech population.

This is a fun and well-told anecdote. Maybe correlation in this case was indeed causation. But…

There's less consensus among scientists than there is on Quora. A few interviews and quotes:

* “Ecology: A world without mosquitoes”, Janet Fang, Nature, 21 July 2010. https://www.nature.com/news/2010/100721/full/466432a.html

* “Zika Raises the Question: Are Mosquitoes Necessary?”, Jason Bittel, National Geographic, February 7, 2016. https://news.nationalgeographic.com/2016/02/160207-mosquitoe...

* “What If Every Mosquito On Earth Went Extinct Tomorrow?”, Ria Misra, October 15, 2017. https://news.nationalgeographic.com/2016/02/160207-mosquitoe...

I'll tentatively add that this topic came up at a dinner with Pardis Sabetti https://www.sabetilab.org and George Church http://arep.med.harvard.edu/gmc/. At the time, neither of them thought mosquitos were an essential part of any animal's food chain. Except that I'm not 100% sure we were talking about mosquitoes at the time – maybe we were talking about some species of bats. :-(

[By the way, Grayson Brown's quote “the ecological damage […] would make eradication not worth it unless there was a very serious public health emergency” may sound clueless or heartless. Charitably, maybe he was referring to eradication in developed nations only, and maybe the full interview – which I haven't listened to – makes this clear.]

This debate is exactly why I think some individual or small group is just going to do it without asking permission.

That story doesn't sound realistic at all. A bunch of homeowners setting up mosquito traps, however effective, around their homes, would not have much of an effect on the mosquito population of a rural area. And then birds would forage on a much larger area than just around a single lake with 12 houses.

Just think about it: 12 homeowners around a single lake fight mosquitoes so effectively that even eagles disappear from the area?

Can we figure out to replace mosquitoes in some fashion that doesn't feature human as an essential part of food chain?

"You literally had to run from your car to the house" isn't how you would like to live for the entirety of your life. Of course I don't have high hopes for Californians to understand this.

Tbe bottom line of the article is:

> I’m not going to kid you. It’s excellent now that the mosquitoes are gone. We don’t regret making that big effort.

I'm from Minnesota... Mosquitoes are very bad here. Yes, there are times when you will run from a car to a house because the mosquitoes are eating.

But eradicating mosquitoes is a bad idea. My hunch is that in most cases, they act as genetic pollinators, incremental vaccinators carrying the latest news of disease so that animals can react.

Well, roughly half of land is arid and has no mosquitoes to speak of. And you know, animals and humans get by without those vaccinations.

What? I'm not understanding your reasoning here.

The issue is not about land area, it's about fauna biomass location. Think more like this:

https://static6.businessinsider.com/image/582c7dd8ba6eb69a01...

On the vaccination issue, I encourage you to look up Jenner and his realization of the link between cowpox and smallpox. It's a good foundation for GP's idea.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Jenner#Invention_of_the...

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1200696/

I'm not certain of mosquito-per-fauna-biomass distributions, nor GP's thesis, but it's not a bad one overall and may have merit.

If arid land can do well without mosquitoes, perhaps wetter land can do too. Have more flies for example.

If people in arid land can live healthy without mosquitoes, I think it's a good bet that people in wetter land can too.

From some of the papers I've read, the necessary tech seems to be way cheaper; like <$50k USD. That's the truly frightening thing. Once scientist even wanted to make home CRISPR kits available so individuals could study the effects on bacteria and yeast:

https://newatlas.com/home-crispr-gene-editing-kit/40362/

Too late: http://www.the-odin.com/diy-crispr-kit/

So were basically at the point now with genetic engineering that we were at with nuclear weapons in The Sum of All Fears. It still amazes me that no-one's built a successful non-state-aligned nuclear weapon yet.

The blueprints are out there, it’s the weapons-grade fissile material that’s hard to come by ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Fortunately the weapons-grade biological material is hard to come too. Oh, wait …

How are you so sure that disease vector mosquitos don't play an important role in the ecosystem? I would posit that predicting ecosystem outcomes is no easier than predicting weather.

>How are you so sure that disease vector mosquitos don't play an important role in the ecosystem?

They actually do. They protect the environment by culling local pests like humans.

Only a handful of mosquito species transmit human diseases. Other non-harmful species can fill their ecological niche.

>Other non-harmful species can fill their ecological niche.

do you mean the niche of malaria transmitter? I suppose it wouldn't be that hard for another species of mosquito to become a transmitter.

Anyway, out of curiosity i once spent some time correlating genetically modified mosquito releases with the modern Zika outbreaks (there weren't Zika outbreaks before 2007 according to WHO, only like 14 separate cases) - the Zika outbreaks started in 2007 and for the most of them it was possible to find information that there were a release of those mosquito in the area of the outbreak 1-3 years before the outbreak (in the case of Gabon 2007 outbreak it was those mosquito development and testing in previous years on an island off the cost of Gabon. Another 2007 outbreak - Yap island - also seems being a testing ground in the years leading to the outbreak).

Do you know what connections those handful of mosquitos have to various aspects of the ecosystem other than transmitting human diseases?

I don’t care. Malaria and dengue are sufficiently bad that I’d take the risk.

This has been studied, though. No animal only eats mosquitoes, and I’d only start with a few species (but likely expand to all of them.)

Nothing is sufficiently bad to not care. Caring is the only way you can even tell if there is a risk, if you’re playing with fire, if there is a chain of causality that leads right back to you.

DDT was supposed to be a risk-free way of killing mosquitoes. Nobody knew the side effect existed.

Completely agree. Even if it would be really bad for the ecosystem (it would likely have little impact), the benefits are so very vast out would be worth it.

This is an example of score insensitivity. How many humans die each year of malaria? If this was in Europe or America we would already have done it.

I'm sorry but that is a bit ignorant on your part. Ecosystems and ecosystem services should not be underestimated. You could have a much bigger impact that you could think of.

References, please? I would be surprised if mosquitoes don't play any role in the ecosystem, honestly.

Of course they do. They just have almost perfect substitutes that would quickly take their place, the non-disease carrying mosquito species.

Buy real estate futures in malaria prone areas first you’ll be rich.

Well if he's already got over $10 million...

It's a noble plan, but have you considered the harm you could do to scientific progress - if such a plot were discovered, the negative publicity could set back gene drive science by decades.

The potential benefits of gene drives are so vast that (to me) this overwhelms other concerns (yes, even if you successfully eliminated all mosquito borne diseases).

I'd love to see (biting) mosquitos eradicated, but I've come to believe that the slow process of an "official" eradication program is ultimately superior (despite finding the humanitarian toll of delay sickening).

Happy to elaborate if it might help you think things through.

Why not a gene drive on the disease itself?

Mosquitoes are bad enough even without any diseases. They greatly reduce potential life quality of huge amount of land.

So it's not about the disease after all eh? Pick and choose species that annoy us?

That's about it.

You know who also annoy me? Roaches. Do you suggest searching for a peace threaty with them?

All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.

It's not very secret anymore :P

I think you'll be surprised by the lack of retaliation and even cheers you'll get around. No one likes mosquitoes. And I think I read somewhere (and I'm too tired to google it) that ecologists believe there will be little to no harm to the ecosystem if they will just one day poof away from the face of the earth. Even animal rights organizations will meh over it.

"there will be little to no harm to the ecosystem if they will just one day poof away from the face of the earth"

Well, perhaps not if the specific species that carry the diseases vanish. Eliminating all mosquitoes would almost certainly have an effect.

Of course, that's one reason why gene drives are so attractive -- you can target individual species, rather than indiscriminately killing every insect in the area.

Wouldn't other mosquito species start becoming vectors though? It's not like the niche the vector is occupying goes away.

The thing that makes Aedes aegypti such a good vector is its tendency to feed on multiple humans. They get spooked and fly off from a feeding site, then land again to try again, and the subsequent bites might not be on the same human. So one infected mosquito can vector a disease to an entire room of people if there is enough activity to make them attempt that many bites.

Many other mosquitoes will just stick it out and hope you don't notice them before they fill up. They either succeed in one bite or get squashed. Those mosquitoes have less opportunity to acquire a disease from an infected human, and less opportunity to transmit one to an uninfected human. And if there is no mechanism for that vector to pass to a mosquito's offspring, the one-bite behavior means there is no transmission between humans at all.

I expect that would depend on why only certain species can transmit human malaria. Yes if the reason is purely regional, but if there's something else (length of lifecycle, presence or absence of certain enzymes, ability to take blood from human) then there would have to be incredibly fast adaptation for malaria to survive.

The parasites don't survive equally well even within the species they inhabit.

https://www.cdc.gov/malaria/about/biology/mosquitoes/

Probably not. Humans have eliminated many species and the niches they occupied haven't been always been filled by other species. Megafauna on many continents is a good example.

You are joking, right?

No, this is the common understanding.

I have a hard time believing mosquitos aren't a significant food source for something. What takes their place? And anyway, why would we need to make them extinct everywhere, and not just places people live?

Mosquitoes are a large food source for birds, especially migratory birds in the northern regions.

Eliminating them would be devastating to Scandinavia's biodiversity.

No genuine scientific conclusion confirms this. It's a hypothesis and one we have no way of testing, but people think it sounds awesome so they spread it without a good understating.

We definitely don’t know for sure, but we absolutely know the harm caused by malaria and dengue. (I personally care about this from living in places with both, and because Elon Musk almost died from dengue, apparently.)

Everyone almost died of a lot of things. We're all lucky to be alive. For people in countries with Malaria, its like the flu. In fact, flu also kills a lot of people.

What's the solution to diseases? Improving peoples' general health and wellbeing, so that their immune systems can handle the disease. The solution is not to eradicate an entire species in the middle of an already distraught global ecological catastrophe.

For every instance of a mosquito causing a malarial infection, there are likely uncountable instances of mosquitoes causing inoculation.

Reminds me of this Guardian article investigating such a plan to combat Zika, Dengue, and so on: https://www.theguardian.com/global/2016/feb/10/should-we-wip...

The law of unintended consequences says you'll end up killing off mosquitoes, related insects and thing that feed on them like birds and small reptiles.. slowly eliminating large portions of the food chain.

Until it reaches new stable equilibrium, becomes new status quo and get protected from introduction of invasive species.

If you did it, you should receive the Nobel Peace Prize and the Nobel Prize in Medicine.

Eradicate wasps while you're at it (thx in advance)

Ticks too, please?

I think you could even incentivize this via the blockchain... some kind of black hat x prize for doing stuff like this. You create an ethereum contract that people can donate to, and the balance gets distributed to someone to posts a blockchain account linked to the gene drive genetic sequence. The contract pays out once some scientists publish a paper showing someone did it and publishing the matching gene drive code from the wild.