I encourage everyone to read up on it themselves. Other commenters have already pointed out this species is invasive everywhere outside Africa, constitutes only a tiny fraction of the mosquito population where they exist, and doesn't fill any meaningful ecological role anywhere.

> considering this has never been done before

But that's the point, it kind of has. Countless species are going extinct all the time. The only thing different about this case is it's deliberate and using a scary sounding means.

I think maybe they were taking specifically about mosquito eradication

Even talking only about deliberate mosquito eradication, we've been doing that for a long, long time too, overwhelmingly with far more devastating methods than this targeted one.

That's already a thing. They fog the streets at night in the closest town to where I live, in the summer. Consequences - every bug dies as well as mosquitoes. This seems slightly more targeted than that approach.

Actually this exact approach has already been used to great effect for several years in south america. And if you google there are a lot of pop science stories with scientists saying they fill no noche and are fine to eliminate. Only found one saying we should keep them. Some guy from perdue.

Isn't South America already losing biodiversity at a rapid pace? Seems like it could be difficult to separate the effects of an experiment like this from the steady background of biodiversity loss already present across the continent.

It seems unlikely to me that any creature could have existed in an ecosystem for tens of millions of years without evolving into some sort of important niche. Obviously I could be wrong here, but the claim that we can just eliminate them with zero repercussions strikes me as a bit of scientific arrogance. Nature is a complex dynamic system, how could we possibly know what unexpected side-effects might occur when we tamper with it?

> existed in an ecosystem for tens of millions of years without evolving into some sort of important niche

These mosquitos are a man-brought invasive species, so that argument doesn't fly.

+ You're already mentioning we don't know what effect species going extinct can have... But that's the point, countless species are already going extinct anyway, there's literally zero reason why you would worry or care more about keeping this one.

That biodiversity loss is primarily species in the shrinking rainforests. These mosquitoes are released in major cities and don't have measurable impacts on populations far outside those cities. It is easy to imagine something going wrong. When the scientists are saying don't do something, we all say "trust the scientific consensus", but when that consensus says "nah its fine" we distrust them.

Not exactly a citation but there is strong evidence that mosquitos evolved to follow people. Their main niche in the environment, then, is predating humans; they are eaten by other things but only if humans don't kill or displace them first.