I am not afraid of GM stuff, but does anyone else think this idea is potentially really dumb? What about everything that relies on these mosquitoes as a food source? I am not an expert... but trying to just kill off an entire species sounds like a TERRIBLE idea...
The people behind this program aren't fools. They're experts who have given a lot of thought to this problem. Some basic points should alleviate your fears. First, the mosquito they're trying to eradicate is a non-native species. Second, said mosquito is the primary vector for Dengue fever, which infects hundreds of thousands and kills hundreds in Brazil every year. Even if this mosquito was native to South America, eradicating it would almost certainly help people.
It's interesting how support for this program decreases with distance from it. If this outbreak was happening in your country, hurting your family, killing your friends, I doubt you'd be so loath to support GM solutions.
A side note: 99.9% of all species that have ever existed have gone extinct. Nature is not some carefully-balanced system. It is chaos and suffering on a scale we cannot imagine. The majority of wild animals live in a state of constant hunger, pain, and disease. Those with sufficiently complex brains live in fear of predators. Speaking of predators: We would be horrified to watch a man vivisect an antelope, but we pay to watch documentaries of lions doing the same thing. Apparently animal cruelty is fine when it's done by other animals.
Scientists studied getting rid of all mosquitoes globally, and came to the conclusion it wouldn't have much of a negative impact (and a huge net positive for due ending malaria, dengue, etc.) Nothing eats exclusively mosquitoes, and those animals (birds) which do eat them could just switch to other insects, which generally are not in short supply.
>> If this outbreak was happening in your country, hurting your family, killing your friends, I doubt you'd be so loath to support GM solutions.
That's an appeal to shame. It's true that people are generally selfish. And not only those in the developed world. It's also true that, when under physical duress, people can be made to support just about any immoral, illegal or just plain bad idea. Just because the majority of those opposing it are not the same people as those who most stand to benefit directly it does not follow that, in this case, using GM is fine.
> First, the mosquito they're trying to eradicate is a non-native species.
I really don't get the environmentalist emphasis on the world being, and staying, the way god ordained it at the beginning of the universe. Mosquitoes have a generation time measured in weeks; for any practical purpose, there's no such thing as a non-native mosquito. Assuming a mosquito generation length of one month, and a human generation length of 25 years, we can see that a mosquito population that's been around for 5 years is the equivalent of a human one that's been around for 1500.
Trying to distinguish between "native" species and "non-native" species makes all the sense of distinguishing between "anthropogenic global warming" and "natural global warming". There's no point. A phenomenon is good, or it's bad; it's not bad just because you can finger a particular cause, it's not good just because things were that way 100 years ago, and it's not bad just because things were different 10 years ago. Judge by the effects.
The distinction is important because it means that there probably won't be an ecological imbalance if we exterminate the mosquitoes, since there are no species that exclusively depend on them, or which they are responsible for keeping in check.
When you eliminate a native species, the unintended consequences can be wide.
This makes the weird assumption that a non-native species will never occupy any position within the local ecology. Consider a (slightly unintuitive) case of an intrusion into a well-established ecology: maize into human society. Europeans came to America with a level of reliance on maize of exactly zero, since they weren't aware it existed. They brought their own grains. And we grow wheat here today. But... if we decided to completely eliminate maize, would there be any consequences for American society? Or for a case with more historical flavor, consider the introduction of the potato to Ireland. There were problems when the potato population failed.
More generally, if species I ("intrusive") arrives and replaces species A ("autochthonous"), why is removing species I more dangerous than removing species A would have been?
The aedes aegyptus is an invasive species in the Americas and should be eradicated.
There are about 3000 species of mosquitoes in the world, of which three bear deadly disease:
1. Anopheles (malaria, elephantiasis, and encephalitis)
2. Culex (encephalitis, elephantiasis, and West Nile virus)
3. Aedes (yellow fever, dengue, and encephalitis)
Asian Tiger mosquitoes are a subspecies of Aedes.
If we were to wipe out these three voracious breeds, the world would go on: flowers would continue to be pollinated, frogs and birds would continue to feed.
The risk of this type of eradication effort is not that we "upset the balance" but that we somehow create a resistant strain or mutation that is an even bigger problem, such as the Africanized honey bee fiasco. But that risk is relatively minor, since they're releasing sterile mosquitoes to end reproduction, not fertile ones designed to continue breeding.
There are a couple of hundred species that feed on blood; the rest don't. If we rid the world of all the blood sucking mosquito species, likely it would make little difference ecologically, and millions of lives would be saved and the quality of life for humans would increase. It's highly unlikely that we can do it, but we should at least try.
The naysayers have a rather weak case. I say, go for it. Nature is always in balance. Life is dynamic, not static; species come and go all the time, and always have done so.
First, I'd like to point that those are gender, not species. Those together add to thousands of species, and you forgot at least about Lutzomyia.
That said, I completely agree that we should get rid of them. And think it's more likely than you stated, if we can extinguish so many species, it can't be so much harder to do it on purpose. Currently we are barely trying, with techniques from the earlier XX century.
Well, we could extinguish the mosquitoes if we nuked and irradiated the world so thoroughly that we experienced a 10-year nuclear winter that would cause mass extinction. No more animals to feed on, no more breeding zones, hence no more mosquitoes!
But that would come with some undesirable side effects such as the eradication of our own species (except for a few living in hardened, self-sufficient underground shelters as in the "Silo" novel).
Arguably, there are too many humans, so perhaps it would make sense to reboot the world with a tiny core of eugenically superior men and women, plus seed stocks and animals to repopulate, and of course maintain massive DNA banks for future species re-creation and replenishment as needed.
Or, preferably, terraform Mars or Venus and selectively introduce only the flora and fauna that humans like, and hope some jerk doesn't accidentally or deliberately release ticks, mosquitoes, and other pests into this erstwhile perfect new Eden.
There was a national science foundation study a few years back that suggested if you removed ALL mosquitos from the earth, there were in nearly EVERY case alternative food supplies for animals that currently eat mosquitos.
One effect of parasites and diseases is to increase diversity. If a species becomes too common, a disease or parasite targeting it can flourish, cutting back its numbers and allowing other species to take its place. Eradicating mosquitoes might have an unexpected effect like making the number of rats or some other vermin to explode.
I’m not sure, but perhaps eradicating the Aedes aegypti is enough to prevent most of the dengue transmission.
And the Aedes albopictus (Tiger mosquito) is also a non native specie in Brazil, so it’s probably a good idea to eradicate it too, perhaps using the same method. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aedes_albopictus
> What about everything that relies on these mosquitoes as a food source?
Nothing in the world relies on mosquitoes as a food source. Some insectivores will happily eat mosquitoes if they can get them, but mainly feed on other species.
Mosquitoes also play a role in pollination in some areas, but, again, all mosquito-pollinated plants are more reliably pollinated by other local insects.
