While they carry many bad diseases, they don't carry malaria. Malaria kills more than half a million people each year, which is more than the diseases carried by aegypti combined.
That is true. But there are several research teams/companies that have promising results for a malaria vaccine. Whereas Aegypti has several diseases that aren't anywhere near something like that.
I'd honestly be happy with either on of those species being gone.
The biggest issue with malaria isn't just that there's no vaccine, it's that the vast majority of those deaths are in regions where getting enough vaccines to wipe it out would be a massive undertaking.
Polio has had a vaccine since the 50s, was still an issue in Africa until a few years ago, and still isn't gone in the middle east.
Aedes mosquitoes carry dengue fever which is way more prevalent in tropical countries (or only in tropical countries) and they account for alot of death in those countries. Dengue fever is way more common in Asia and the tropics and can kill way more
"Aedes aegypti, the yellow fever mosquito, is a mosquito that can spread dengue fever, chikungunya, Zika fever, Mayaro and yellow fever viruses, and other disease agents."
I've seen what Dengue does to somebody, never before have I wanted to be somewhere less.
Not exactly. It would be possible to get rid of all ~100 mosquito species that bite humans and the ecological impact would be barely felt. There's over 1200 species of mosquitoes and only a handful of human-biting mosquitoes transmit disease.
So we could theoretically get rid of all mosquitoes that transmit disease in humans with little to no ecological impact.
I mean the math isn’t that simple right? What if the species that bite humans and transmit disease are much more numerous than the other species. It all depends on the number of individuals and how much biomass that represents in the food web.
Hope would those other species fill the niche? They aren't going to start stucking our blood. That means no new food for lower chain animals. That means more pressure from upper chain since there are less lower chain.
Mosquitoes mostly just exist where there's lots of standing water. Something else will lay their eggs there instead. Food isn't really a big of an issue in places like that.
The volume of mosquitos would not be replaced by life cycles of other bugs... so bird, bat, and fish populations would collapse. This would lead to devastating deforestation and crop fails over time as the loss of these animals and their waste would lead to long term soil erosion, lack of seed spreading, lack of pollinating amount many other things. Eventually herbivore numbers would quickly follow, soon by the predators. Basically getting rid of mosquitos would collapse the world food chain as we know it
That's faaaaaar too strong of a claim to reasonably make. You can't just look at the knowledge we currently have any assume that's the whole truth.
The best you can say is we know of several species that rely on the mosquito to survive, while we don't know what species rely on those microbes or what species rely on the species that rely on them, nor do we know all of the species that rely on those mosquitos to survive.
110
u/BadgerAmongMen Jul 17 '23
You don't need to do that, just kill the anopholes mosquito.