Aside from the question of whether we should kill all mosquitoes, I question if we can. Is there really a pesticide that we can apply globally that kills all mosquitoes, but not huge swaths of other types of insects? And what is the cost of this--who is paying for this global campaign?
Let's Kill All the Mosquitoes
131–140 of 441 posts
Re: Let's Kill All the Mosquitoes
#132Earlier quoted context omitted.
Don't things eat mosquitos? Do any of those things matter?
No one is talking about wiping out all mosquitos.
For those modding this down, yes, that's the link-bait title of the article.
The link-bait title is wrong. No one is seriously talking about eliminating all mosquitos. There's discussion of eliminating two (two) of the over 3,500 species of mosquito, specifically those that carry horrible human diseases.
Maybe you should try reading the article, rather than just the title?
Re: Let's Kill All the Mosquitoes
#133Earlier quoted context omitted.
Can you show me an actual program using CRISPR and gene drive that's produced some effective changes? As far as I know this is still in the realm of theory. And given that we're talking about a single resistance mechanism, I'm going to guess that it will very quickly be defeated by evolution. DDT was the "perfect" mosquito killer, as well. It didn't last - resistance inevitably follows these attempts in wild populati…
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, respectively."
So you'll spend a ton of money building a fancy CRISPR system in your mosquitoes, release them into the wild, and in a matter of months you will have parasites with on-target mutations in these proteins that will allow them to evade your resistance mechanism. I'd lay $1000 on this without blinking.
You're basically talking about curing malaria in mosquitoes. Why not, instead, just cure malaria in humans?
Re: Let's Kill All the Mosquitoes
#134Re: Let's Kill All the Mosquitoes
#135Most 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?
Evolution does not work that way. Parasites are generally happy to keep on reproducing until their host dies - there's no reason for them to stop, since the only reasoning that evolution understands is "there tends to be more things that reproduce better". Malaria reproduces better by going through human hosts and mosquito carriers than by going airborne. If going airborne helped an individual generation of malaria, malaria would already be airborne.
Re: Let's Kill All the Mosquitoes
#136I'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 against virus instead of just killing some random things.
Even if we just kill those mosquitoes species you know what? Nature evolves. Other mosquitoes and viruses will come. Do we kill them too?
Re: Let's Kill All the Mosquitoes
#137We've done this lots[1] of[2] times[3] when it threatens agriculture, but when it threatens the lives of poor people in third world countries, suddenly we're worried about the ecosystem? There will be an environmental impact, but it will be from hundreds of millions of humans not getting malaria and climbing their way out of property, not from the lack of mosquitoes in the ecosystem. It's still a significant problem,…
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…
"they could go to jail for misallocation of taxpayer funds" can you site a source where this has happened before...
Re: Let's Kill All the Mosquitoes
#138Earlier quoted context omitted.
> create or leave only life that has a value to people There is a Jewish creation story (Rashi, Genesis 1:11) that God told the trees to make their bark (or the wood itself) edible to humans. The trees refused because "if we did that humans would eat all of us, leaving none behind". It seems to me that the trees got it wrong: Plants that are valuable to humans exist in far greater numbers than those that are not.
Fascinating. Maybe that's the point of the story? It's not as if the ancient Hebrews were unfamiliar with agriculture. Perhaps the meaning is that people should listen to God even if it seems counterintuitive, because you could be more wrong than you (a puny mortal) could possibly understand. That was really interesting. Thanks for that.
The meaning to you or the meaning to the ancient?
If the latter, I'm not sure if people back then were so megalomaniac to consider being useful to humans as an advantage. The world was much less developed before steam engines gave us craploads of energy for free.
Re: Let's Kill All the Mosquitoes
#139Earlier 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?
What if the diseases that depend on mosquitoes to spread mutate/evolve themselves to spread via air...
You know, "life finds a way" and all that..
Re: Let's Kill All the Mosquitoes
#140On 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?
One known evolutionary purpose of mosquitos is that "mosquitoes represent a considerable biomass of food for wildlife on the lower rungs of the food chain."[1] so they are feeding the some other species that may or may not have direct impact on humans.
[1]: http://insects.about.com/od/flies/a/10-facts-about-mosquitoe...