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Let's Kill All the Mosquitoes

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Re: Let's Kill All the Mosquitoes

#141

Post by jessaustin »

nickff wrote: post #114
maaku wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those eradications were paid for by the Department of Agriculture (and equivalent organizations in other regions). Who is going to pay for the mosquito? I'm not objecting. I think we should eradicate the mosquito. But as someone who has worked for the government (albeit a different branch) I know that bureaucrats are not being evil or heartless when they don't allocate funds for necessary work that falls outside of t…

> "bureaucrats are not being evil or heartless when they don't allocate funds for necessary work that falls outside of their mandate: they could go to jail for misallocation of taxpayer funds. " Which bureaucrat has gone to jail for making any decision of this sort? The BLM sold ~1700 protected wild horses to a slaughterhouse a few years ago, and I don't think anyone was even reprimanded.[1] EPA allowed 11 million li…

Clearly the EPA screwed up, but the BLM should have promoted rather than jailed the bureaucrat who sold the feral horses. That program should be ramped up: it would be better for the horses and for the arid environment that they inhabit if the absolutely necessary regular culling resulted in nutrition rather than thousands of horses penned up to no purpose for the rest of their lives. It's not as though we're going to run out of them, for the several hundred people every year who decide to buy a mustang. Giant ungulates with no natural predators, there will always be more mustangs, at least until irresponsible humans allow them to destroy their habitat completely.

Re: Let's Kill All the Mosquitoes

#142

Post by Htsthbjig »

lifeformed wrote: post #27
mikestew wrote: post #5

This is one of those ideas that sounds genius on its face, until it's actually implemented. Kudzu? Grows fast, prevents erosion, let's pay farmers to till it into the top soil. MTBE? Prevents engine knock, makes for cleaner air, let's mandate its use at the federal level. Whoopsie, once it's in the water we can't get it out, and its a carcinogen. Let's kill all of the mosquitos because we find their presence unpleasa…

There will be side effects, but could it really be worse than the alternative? That is, one million deaths per year.

Of course. Do you eat pesticides for breakfast?

How do you supposedly kill mosquitoes without chemical dangerous products? Products that will kill people with cancer, asthma or birth defects.

How do you kill mosquitoes without killing bees and other useful insects that pollinize most of the agrarian production?

Most people ignore that on their own(using just wind to pollinize) the food that we cultivate the food production would be 5 percent or 10% of the current production. 50% of the world population will starve.

Bees already died en masse after the introduction of new pesticides, that had to be delayed in lots of places to study how they were accepting bees.

The healthier bees today live on cities like Paris which had forgotten pesticides in parks. The irony.

Ignorant people are very dangerous. Most people, specially experts on a specific field, are ignorant in most of the other areas.

Near my house there is a river 30 years ago some smart ass though it was a good idea to introduce an alien species of fish into it. No problem, the new fish was small and won't eat the local fish, they said.

Genius! The new fish eat all the eggs of local native population, that basically become extinct as a result.

Re: Let's Kill All the Mosquitoes

#143

Post by saulrh »

mikestew wrote: post #107
saulrh wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

MBTE is unconfirmed as a carcinogen except at very high doses and can be efficiently and economically removed from water with simple bioreactors. It is better than either lead additive or the health effects of increased pollution from inferior combustion from increased knocking. It is in fact used medically to dissolve gallstones by way of injecting it into the gallbladder. It is not required to be added to gasoline;…

MTBE...can be efficiently and economically removed from water with simple bioreactors. That wasn't the case fifteen years ago. Mandating something, then hoping we come up with an inexpensive way to clean up the mess later probably isn't a good long-term plan. It is in fact used medically to dissolve gallstones by way of injecting it into the gallbladder. Arsenic has medicinal uses, too. I'll swing by the house later…

I did some more looking around. Oral MTBE is a carcinogen at levels above 200mg/kg/day in rats. When inhaled it has acute toxic effects before it has carcinogenic effects. MTBE tastes bad enough to render drinking water unpalatable at levels around 10ug/l. So you basically can't drink enough to give yourself cancer.

Calling it a persistent pollutant is perfectly fine. It's bad enough to make entire aquifers taste bad until you put in the hardware to clean it out. What it isn't is a problematic carcinogen.

"Because of the intense odor (and taste) of MTBE, humans will not tolerate either air or water concentrations sufficient to produce the cytotoxic precursors required to promote cellular proliferation." http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1539-6924.1997....

> Arsenic has medicinal uses, too.

Not for its macroscopic physical properties it doesn't.

> I'll swing by the house later to drop some in the water inlet of your house.

Just be sure to stick to things like the EPA exposure limits and so on.

> That wasn't the case fifteen years ago. Mandating something, then hoping we come up with an inexpensive way to clean up the mess later probably isn't a good long-term plan.

That's fair.

> You mean do my research such that my conclusions match yours? Or did you just have a nice, cold glass of Uncalled-for-Snark(tm) with your breakfast this morning?

I'll admit that a little bit of it is snark. I find that the kind of person that's most vulnerable to misleading science is also pretty vulnerable to snark. But, no, I really did mean that you needed to do more research.

Re: Let's Kill All the Mosquitoes

#144

Post by guard-of-terra »

SubZero wrote: post #11

How many bugs and spiders rely on mosquitoes as part of their diet? Out of all of the ideas in this article, not once was the impact to the biological food chain discussed. We can kill all of the little annoying things, but how many beneficial organisms are being supported by them?

Unfortunately, I am a part of mosquitoes' diet, and will gladly want them to go finally and never return.

They make a great great deal of nice countryside not enjoyable. Even if they don't carry malaria or zika here, am I bound to suffer?

Re: Let's Kill All the Mosquitoes

#145

Post by ommunist »

cik2e wrote: post #67
joekrill wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They very well could be. That's just it -- we don't know. And when we kill them all off, are we going to be able to reverse it when we find out that the result is causing two million deaths per year?

Under what hypothetical scenario would killing off mosquitos cause two million (human?) deaths per year?

Easy. Untold side effect of MTBe caused infertility in 50% of cases in second generation of black women in treated regions. Entire country was depopulated in 25 years. Like that research article from 2056?

Re: Let's Kill All the Mosquitoes

#146

Post by slapshot »

imakesnowflakes wrote: post #123
saulrh wrote: post #60

Most of the "whoops" tales are people that didn't listen to their scientists telling them not to, didn't have scientists at all, or were from long enough ago that we can discard their stories as irrelevant in the same way that we'd discard things like "spaceflight is impossible" and "nukes will end war". We've now traced the food chain around malaria mosquitoes out to three or four degrees of separation, including th…

Layman here. Even if the impact on the food chain is zero, does it mean that there won't be other impacts? For example, on the eradication of mosquitoes, what if the disease that are currently only spread via mosquitoes mutate/evolve themselves to be airborne?

> what if the disease that are currently only spread via mosquitoes mutate/evolve themselves to be airborne?

Evolution doesn't have an intent. Diseases can't "evolve themselves." Evolution happens through random mutations* and selection of the fittest. If a mutation makes a virus or bacteria or protozoan more likely to survive, then the descendants of the mutant tend to multiply more and become more common. If the mutation makes the organism less likely to survive, descendants of the mutant tend to die out over time. (In other words, no matter how hard you hope your offspring will be born with four arms, they never will be.)

If anything, eliminating mosquitoes will make us SAFER from airborne zika or malaria. Why? Right now, there are tens of millions of infected mosquitoes out there right now. If airborne malaria is possible, there are tens of millions of chances for it to occur every day. And that would be such a powerful disease that it wouldn't matter that there also exists bloodborne malaria. If we eliminate tens of millions of malaria hosts, we reduce the number of chances for malaria to mutate into an airborne form.

As it happens, I don't think airborne malaria is likely -- the life cycle of malaria is way too complex and depends too much on stages that are specific to mosquitoes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malaria But the idea is the same.

* And a few other processes, such as DNA exchange, but the effect is the same for this purpose.

Re: Let's Kill All the Mosquitoes

#147

Post by Turing_Machine »

astazangasta wrote: post #133
Turing_Machine wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you show me an actual program using CRISPR and gene drive that's produced some effective changes? So your argument is that it can't be done because no one has done it? No one has released gene drive systems to the wild, but there is every reason to believe that it will work fine, and no credible reason to believe that it won't.

Err, I can give you a credible reason to believe that it won't: the parasite will inevitably develop resistance. Here is the paper where they talk about the mechanism of resistance being conferred on the mosquito: http://www.pnas.org/content/109/28/E1922.abstract The mechanism is this: "These scFvs are derived from antibodies specific to a parasite chitinase, the 25 kDa protein and the circumsporozoite protein, respe…

First, you're confusing wiping out the mosquito species with giving the mosquitos resistance to the malaria parasite. Those are two different things.

Second, there is no reason that a CRISPR-based system is limited to a single target. Will you also lay $1,000 against a system that targets ten species-unique sequences at once?

You're basically talking about curing malaria in mosquitoes.

Neither I nor the article is talking about that. It's a discussion of making the mosquito species itself extinct.

Re: Let's Kill All the Mosquitoes

#148

Post by nemothekid »

MrArtichaut wrote: post #136

I'm the only one not comfortable with the idea of wiping whole species just because we don't like them? I mean, I'm far fromthe Gaia thing, but what rights do we have to do that? And next? Rats, cockroaches? Hey, this specie of birds doesn't do anything useful and eat our fruits, why not killing them all? Mosquitoes aren't even "responsible" for those diseases... Maybe we should invest in proactive body defenses agai…

>just because we don't like them?

It's bit stronger than "we don't like them"

>Maybe we should invest in proactive body defenses against virus instead of just killing some random things.

Invest more than the billions that billions that Bill Gates has already invested?

Re: Let's Kill All the Mosquitoes

#149

Post by SimpleXYZ »

hibikir wrote: post #15
mikestew wrote: post #5

This is one of those ideas that sounds genius on its face, until it's actually implemented. Kudzu? Grows fast, prevents erosion, let's pay farmers to till it into the top soil. MTBE? Prevents engine knock, makes for cleaner air, let's mandate its use at the federal level. Whoopsie, once it's in the water we can't get it out, and its a carcinogen. Let's kill all of the mosquitos because we find their presence unpleasa…

Mosquitos aren't about unpleasantness though: It is a vector for deadly disease in the tropics. We are talking hundreds of thousands of deaths a year. Now, getting rid of all of them might not be the smartest idea: it carries plenty of risk, but to say that they are just unpleasant is a major understatement.

Exactly, we are talking about millions of people if you go back a few thousand years.

Re: Let's Kill All the Mosquitoes

#150

Post by mrweasel »

hellbanner wrote: post #7

On reddit, I remember seeing something like "Research assures government that killing mosquitos would have no negative effect on world ecology"... right above another thread titled "Scientists underestimate ecological impact of species destruction"... Do we actually understand Mosquitos role in the planet's eco system?

>Research assures government that killing mosquitos would have no negative effect on world ecology

Neither would killing of the last few panda (stupid, useless animal), but we wouldn't actually do it. With mosquitoes, do to their large numbers, it would seem like a bit of a gamble. If we're wrong it would be hard to undo killing all the mosquitoes.

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