Isn’t the top of the food chain where we see the biggest thread to biodiversity.

This reminds me of my favorite term from any college course: “charismatic megafauna.”

Is this actually a useful effect of mosquitoes? It seems like any organisms that feed on waste and corpses would accomplish the same thing but better.

Yeah exactly. Beetles, worms, and fungi do the job quite nicely. We don’t need mosquitoes at all. When they’re gone other species will pick up the slack.

This is a very interesting way to think about mosquitoes.