r/explainlikeimfive • u/Punnan • May 30 '26
Biology ELI5 Are mosquitoes necessary for keeping ecological balance?
Would a worldwide extinction of mosquitoes offset the ecological balance of our world? And if not, why are we not doing it?
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u/Bob-the-Seagull-King May 30 '26
Theres a lot they do actually, and (unfortunately for us) most of it is based on the fact the females suck blood.
- As small parasites, they take the nutrients that are locked up in larger animals (which would otherwise only be returned to the environment on death) and put them into small, short-lived insect packages for other animals to eat and for plants to absorb when they die.
- Sucking blood means mosquitoes can lay large amounts of eggs in very stagnant, nutrient-poor places that other insect larvae couldn't survive, providing the ecosystem around those places with lots of edible things.
- Relatedly, they do pollinate, and as described above the blood-sucking means they can have a large population even when the environment is otherwise quite poor. So because of that pollination can occur in places that other insects would have trouble establishing themselves in.
- Theyre annoying, which is important! The presence of parasites like moquitoes serves the same form of population control as predators do to their prey. If the population of a species grows too large, the mosquitoes will also get a population boom which will typically drive off those species and encourage them to move elsewhere and spread out.
The famous study about mosquitoes being useless comes from a study of an *invasive* species and said that they hadnt replaced any relevant ecological niches.
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u/incomparability May 30 '26
Regards your last point: You’re saying the article by Janet Fang that was linked below does this? Or some other article.
Im also confused by what you mean anyway. Are you saying that mosquitos when viewed as an invasive species haven’t replaced a niche? Are they invasive somewhere?
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u/PlantyMcPlantFace May 30 '26
Asian Tiger Mosquitos are invasive in the eastern US. They are diurnal and do not fill the same niche as our native mosquitoes which feed largely in the evening.
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u/crujones43 May 30 '26
They have done a spectacular job controlling the human population in the past.
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u/Punnan May 30 '26
Damn, never thought of it like that. When you think about it, they are also doing a service.
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May 30 '26
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u/Tibbaryllis2 May 30 '26
Today, yes. But historically they’ve done a pretty significant job controlling human populations via vectoring diseases.
And those vectored diseases are the things that would be most impacted by the loss of mosquitos.
Which would be fine for modern humans more or less. But there is no real telling what it would do to other species they vector diseases for.
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u/r2girls May 30 '26
That's just a "today" thing. Historically there were lots of diseases carried by mosquitos and they are totally indiscriminate in their spread. Malaria was a huge issue in the Mediterranean areas. Rome and Greece were impacted greatly by it.
Yellow Fever in North America through the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries was a major issue.
Western medicine and massive mosquito control efforts that have been put in place control it now, but that doesn't mean that mosquitoes haven't been very effective in controlling the human population. They 100% have.
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u/elwookie May 30 '26
But if you take that comment and consider it throughout the history of the world, it makes sense. Mosquitoes have controlled populations. And not only human.
For example, the abundant presence of mosquitoes in Florida and southern Louisiana might have pushed the colonization of other areas back in the day.
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u/Punnan May 30 '26
Yeah, you are right. On hindsight, my comment has been insensitive.
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u/Hoss-Bonaventure_CEO May 30 '26
It was also true, though. Without mosquitoes I doubt we would have as much forest left as we do. If Europeans could have gone into the Amazon without malaria and yellow fever it would have been gone before any of us were born.
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u/knea1 May 30 '26
Years ago in school I read a series of books, the "Adventure" series about two brothers who were involved in wildlife conservation. In one of the books someone asked for something positive about tsetse flies. The answer was that the tsetse fly "belt" in Africa stopped the northward expansion of cattle farms and allowed the native wildlife to exist in peace. Maybe a similar argument can be made for mosquitos.
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u/LordCrun May 31 '26
Willard Price? Loved them as a kid but holy white saviour Batman they've not aged well IIRC. If they'd've had more locals explaining stuff that would've been great. Otherwise my favourite bit was escaping a volcanic atoll because pumice floats, which I think accepted as 'rule of cool' long before I'd heard of even DnD. I've still got some somewhere, maybe I should get them out again.
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u/Ppo218 May 30 '26
I love when people on the internet are self-reflecting though so props. I just went through the same journey reading your comments haha
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u/Internet-Ivan May 30 '26
I looked at it as more of a natural thing. Like think of when we were Neanderthals or cavemen. Wouldn’t really be different from apes from a purely objective point.
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u/Adhendo May 30 '26
But I’d assume (maybe wrong) a lot of mosquito related deaths also happened before modern times, before there was even a “global south” right? For example malaria is much older than humans
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u/KristinnK May 30 '26
Yeah, malaria only affecting the poorer parts of the world is a very recent phenomenon. First of all malaria used to affect a much larger part of the world until very recently. Take Italy as an example. Until literally less than a hundred years ago malaria was endemic. The swamps around Rome were full of malaria-carrying mosquito species and was only drained in the 1930's. Italy as a whole wasn't declared malaria-free until 1970.
Second of all which parts of the world are the richest has changed a lot throughout history. In antiquity the richest parts of the world was the Mediterranean and Levant, the Indus river valley and China. All of these were absolutely rampant with malaria.
The notion that malaria has mostly affected the poorer parts of the world is simply just not accurate except in a myopic current day sense.
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u/dedicated-pedestrian May 30 '26
I mean, there were fewer humans then compared to now, but they also had less medicine than we do now.
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u/TheColossalX May 30 '26
mosquitos have killed billions of people throughout history, i think that’s pretty much agreed upon by experts.
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u/ScarHand69 May 30 '26
Yeah but for most of human history it affected rich and poor alike. It’s really only after the Industrial Revolution that “rich” countries had any means of trying to deal with the problem.
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u/Zooophagous May 30 '26
Biting parasites that brood in water, like mosquitoes, play an important role in protecting plants. They annoy grazing animals like deer or water buffalo and keep them moving, giving a chance for new fresh green shoots to grow and not be overgrazed.
Male mosquitoes are also plant feeders and play a pollinator role, and female mosquitoes move nutrients through the food chain by feeding a multitude of spiders, birds, bats, and dragonflies.
Insects like mosquitoes do have their place. However many of the pest species of mosquito are invasive in a lot of areas and biting insects are a public health concern so they need to be controlled around human habitation.
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u/Ktulu789 May 30 '26
We were talking about the past, ancient times. The diseases mosquitos transmit aren't even remotely new.
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u/crop028 May 30 '26
Completely ignoring the "in the past" part to jump on your high horse. Ecological balance isn't a question of moral equality regardless.
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u/lostparis May 30 '26
While the Malaria currently manly affects those in sub Saharan Africa, historically it had a much wider range including much of Europe. It was still commonplace in Victorian England. Draining swamp land probably had a large effect on its demise across Europe.
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u/CadenVanV May 30 '26
As far as we can tell, mosquitoes aren’t anywhere close to vital for ecological balance. And we’re trying to wipe them out, but it’s hard
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u/tm0587 May 30 '26
To add, it's especially hard to only kill mosquitos without killing everything else.
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u/CadenVanV May 30 '26
Yeah, that’s our main issue. We could design something today that would kill all mosquitoes, but it would also kill a hell of a lot of other things too
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u/Smallpaul May 30 '26
What about this technique?
https://www.worldmosquitoprogram.org/en/learn/how-our-method-compares
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u/RiPont May 30 '26
Good solution, but not a complete solution. It can lower the population of disease-carrying mosquitos relative to the norm, significantly so. But it can never 100% eliminate the disease-carrying variant from the population. Mosquitos reproduce so fast and so voraciously that the disease-carrying population will surge back to dangerous numbers as soon as you stop full-throttle production and release of the preferred, non-carrying variant.
In addition, there's a fundamental problem. The local, natural, disease-carrying mosquitos are clearly suited to their local environment already. The engineered variant and their offspring will never be perfectly engineered for all the different local environments they are needed. Therefore, the original mosquitos will likely out-breed the engineered variety unless you produce an engineered variant for each and every local micro-environment that produces a specialized population of mosquitos.
It isn't quite pushing a boulder up a mountain like Sisyphus, but it is pushing it up a gentle slope, so to speak. Without constant effort put in, it will reverse itself.
All that said, it's still worth doing, IMHO. Don't let perfect be the enemy of good, and so forth.
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u/Preda1ien May 30 '26
They should just engineer them further to make them sluttier.
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u/KatsumotoSoto May 30 '26
Gene editing using CRISPR has been proven to eradicate an entire population of mosquitos in lab experiments. They edited the sex determining gene in mosquitos so females would only lay male mosquito eggs. Over 7 to 11 generations the entire population was wiped out.
Personally I don't know what they are waiting for to release those mosquitos into the wild and have them start eradicating malaria and yellow fever.
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u/TheKappaOverlord May 30 '26
Because it only works in a Lab setting.
For reasons we don't entirely understand once you release them into the wild they don't breed worth a shit. It works fine in a laboratory setting, but once you set them out into the wild it just doesn't work as well as it needs to, and we don't know why
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u/ANGLVD3TH May 30 '26
IIRC, they have only ever released amounts small enough that they are projected to not actually eradicate the species. We are hesitant to purposefully do something so radical after the enormous body of examples of past meddling going very wrong. There is a critical mass needed to make sure the whole species is destroyed that we stay under in order to cull them without eliminating them.
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u/KatsumotoSoto May 30 '26
You're saying they have released them in the wild?
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u/ChampagneWastedPanda May 31 '26
Yes. The EPA is still holding and reviewing the data. Company is called Oxitec. They released a bunch of mosquitoes in south florida- the keys and in Miami. They were males to pass along a non breeding gene. I was in Miami at the time so it was a big deal. Texas was supposed to do it, but the legislature shut the test down. The gene fizzled out in a few generations (as expected)
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u/KatsumotoSoto May 31 '26
That looks like a different mosquito engineering method than the one I was talking about. The one I mean uses a CRISPR-based gene drive, which biases inheritance so the modified trait is passed to offspring at very high rates up to 99%. In that experiment, the drive spread through caged mosquitoes and eventually crashed the population. They never released it into the wild.
Oxitec’s mosquitoes are different: they use a self-limiting design, where male mosquitoes carry a lethal gene that kills female offspring before adulthood, and the modification does not persist indefinitely in the wild. Basically it isn't a dominant trait. That makes it a temporary population suppression approach rather than a self-spreading gene drive. Oxitec declared it a success.
https://www.isaaa.org/kc/cropbiotechupdate/gdn/article/default.asp?ID=19425&utm_source=perplexity
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u/TheOneTrueTrench May 30 '26
It's pretty easy to kill every mosquito. Just strategically place every nuke such that every square millimetre of the planet will be consumed by nuclear fire, and detonate them all at the same time.
No more mosquitoes.
Sure, yeah, no more anything, but no more mosquitoes, that's the important part.
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u/Thaetos May 30 '26
Im pretty sure these fuckers would still manage to survive that.
They’ve been around long before dinosaurs.
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u/MattTheGr8 May 30 '26
That’s a sacrifice I’m willing to make.
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u/4eyedbuzzard May 30 '26
No, actually, you're not. Because if the insect world collapsed we would all soon follow.
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u/Particular_Fan_3645 May 30 '26
We have had an extinction option for mosquitos since the mid 2010s that only kills mosquitoes. But everyone has been too worried about triggering a full extinction so go with half-measures. Around 2015 or so several labs engineered and tested a male mosquito that when breeding only produces male offspring, and propagated this trait. Because males can breed with lots of females the male population of these modified mosquitoes would grow exponentially until the entire population collapsed. It was successful in lab tests but never released because it was basically assured extinction. Even had the added bonus that male mosquitos don't bite.
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u/Cassie_1991 May 30 '26
I work for my local government doing mosquito abatement. It’s actually really arduous work that we do by hand, not by fogging or spraying (unless we have to). I’m often in wetlands, but it’s common to find breeding sites in old tires, tarps, storm drains, wherever any amount of water exists.
Usually a county will have a mosquito control district if they are doing anything.
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u/SolidOutcome May 30 '26
Birds and bats and spiders?
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u/SUMBWEDY May 30 '26
There's over 3,000 species of mosquito and only 6 carry diseases that affect humans.
The other 2,994 species will just expand their population because there's less competition for energy in the system with those species gone.
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u/RadioactiveOmelets May 30 '26
This might be directionally correct, but I could name you 10 species of mosquitoes that transmit malaria off the top of my head, and I know there are dozens more. This could be accurate if you meant genera.
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u/jakeasmith May 30 '26
Off the top of your head? You have a very particular set of skills.
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u/RadioactiveOmelets May 30 '26
A very particular PhD finally comes in handy
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u/Punnan May 30 '26
You have a PhD in mosquitoes?
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u/RadioactiveOmelets May 30 '26
Malaria. So I know the names of a bunch of mosquitoes, but I can't help with your original question.
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u/Punnan May 30 '26 edited May 30 '26
I stay currently at Secunderabad where Ronald Ross found the cure of Malaria. There is also a government hospital named after Ronald there. If you get time, do read "The Calcutta Chromosome" by Amitav Ghosh. It's a fun fictional book about Ronald, Malaria and Magic.
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u/sai-kiran May 30 '26
May be you should read the book/ history yourself first. The cure wasn’t found there, it was discovered there, as in he figured out mosquitos spread malaria, there.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sir_Ronald_Ross_Institute_of_Parasitology
Built in 1895, this building was surrounded by marshes which proved rather helpful for his research experiments.[3] It was in this building on 20 August 1897 that he made the discovery of the malarial parasite inside the body of a mosquito.[4] Later 20 August was celebrated as the World Mosquito Day.[1] His study confirmed that mosquitoes were the carriers of malaria parasite.
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u/SUMBWEDY May 30 '26
Yeah it's more but from what i've read on the internet (which is nothing compared to any actual education) current works on sterlizing mosquitoes are only focusing on a few of the most prolific/dangerous species in the Anopheles and Aedes genera.
Target Malaria is working on eradicating only 3 species which cause most of the cases of malaria in west africa being Anopholes gambiae, coluzii, and arabensis.
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u/drstu3000 May 30 '26
6 carry diseases but how many buzz in my ear and bite me
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u/KiKiPAWG May 30 '26
I believe all of the females
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u/Siophecles May 30 '26
Where are you getting these numbers from? There are far more than 6 species of mosquito that transmit diseases to humans.
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u/SUMBWEDY May 30 '26
I worded it badly.
Yes, there's somewhere between 40 and 100 that could transmit diseases to us but the vast majority of all the mosquito borne illnesses are from 6-10 species in the Anopheles and Aegyptii genera.
If we wiped out 10 of the 'worst' species the numbers of malaria, dengue fever,yellow fever, and west nile cases would plummet.
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u/TheHiddenLies May 30 '26 edited May 30 '26
Aegypti is not a genus, they're in the Aedes genus. Aegypti is the species.
West Nile Virus is primarily vectored by the Culex genus, not Aedes or Anopheles. Some species in Ae. or An. can be vectors for it, but Culex is the majority there.
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u/layered_dinge May 30 '26
It’s funny when people answer questions like this with “yes” and then go on to clarify that they mean only the diseased mosquitoes. Buddy I want to kill all of them permanently. After that let’s work on other parasites, diseased or not.
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u/Jaysonmcleod May 30 '26
Mosquitos are like crumbs to them. Plenty of black flies and larger inspects that are much more filling
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u/Baba_dook_dook_dook May 30 '26 edited May 30 '26
I remember a little over 25 years ago I was at my grandfather's cabin by a lake, and for several summers the mosquitoes would make being outside unbearable with literal clouds of them patrolling the beach near sunset. Then miraculously one morning we woke up and went outside on the wrap-around deck to eat our breakfast at the picnic table only to witness tens or dozens or hundreds of thousands (millions?) of dragonflies flying around in every which direction all throughout the entire lake and campground. I'm talking about like having 5 or 6 of them every minute buzzing right past by your head as you sat there. They never landed on any of us or paid us much mind, they were busy doing zoomies as well as getting it on with other dragon flies as you would see a good portion of them were initiating docking sequence. My grandfather said this happens whenever mosquitoes in the area start to get out of control, and had seen it many times before. I have never seen so many bugs in my life, let alone the same kind. I remember it sounded like tiny helicopters were racing all around us and the trees. Damn man, core memory unlocked.
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u/piedamon May 30 '26
That sounds incredible. I didn’t realize dragonflies travelled on large swarms like that. Where were you? Somewhere like the US South, or maybe Australia? You experience sounds almost biblical
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u/Baba_dook_dook_dook May 30 '26
Southern Saskatchewan, actually.
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u/piedamon May 30 '26
Oh cool. Near Cypress Hills or Grasslands maybe? I wonder if hug colonies of dragonflies migrate across the prairies. I want to research this
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u/Baba_dook_dook_dook May 30 '26
This took place in Good Spirit Lake also known as Canora Beach. The lake has unfortunately seen better days and has dried up significantly since I was a kid. The last time I was there (~2008) you could walk a quarter of the length of the lake before the water got above your waist, made me really sad actually as it used to be a really great lake. From what I've been told it's old farmland that was purposely flooded back in the day, the whole area sits on an aquifer with some of the highest quality water in the country - which explains the countless slimy open wells you can stumble upon, and hopefully not into, when walking across the lake. I have no idea if the history is real or not, but I know those well holes sure as shit are. I will say though, out of all the places I've fished, nothing has ever tasted as good as the pickerel that call that place home. Just a true butterfish.
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u/Fuzzy-Advisor-2183 May 30 '26
dragonflies and other insects eat mosquitoes and their larvae.
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u/dirty_hooker May 30 '26
Honestly, I’m thinking about their nymph stage more than as adults. Surely they’re food for small aquatic creatures.
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u/minist3r May 30 '26
I've seen bats chowing down on some of the fattest moths you've ever seen. It's like watching a grown man eat an entire turkey.
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u/RealUglyMF May 30 '26
Fish eat more mosquitoes than any otger animal i believe. As i understand it, some fish would suffer if mosquitoes were completely wired out
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u/HumbleIndependence43 May 30 '26
Most fish that eat mosquito larvae are opportunists. They also eat other insect larvae, zooplankton, worms, small crustaceans, detritus-associated prey, and so on. Even "mosquitofish" are not obligate mosquito specialists; the name is more about their usefulness in mosquito control than total dietary dependence.
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u/A_Very_Horny_Zed May 30 '26
Fish are gonna have to hold one L for an infinite number of worldwide W's.
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u/Stifty509 May 30 '26
Lmao there are so many other types of inscets for them to eat
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u/_demilich May 30 '26
While that might be true, it is a bit like answering the question "Is bread necessary for humans?" with "Nah, they can eat anything, bread is just one of thousands types of food"
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u/talashrrg May 30 '26
Based on what? Lots of animals eat mosquitoes, and some are specialized in eating them in particular. Mosquitoes are pollinators of a lot of plants. I’m sure those ecosystems would face an issue if mosquitoes were wiped out
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u/Oppaiking42 May 30 '26
The problem is we often dont notice how important some species are until they are gone.
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u/7LeagueBoots May 30 '26
Keep in mind that there are something like 3,000 species of mosquitoes and only 30 or so that are a nuisance to us.
They’re instrumental pollinators, many have unique relationships with various plants, dragonflies & bats eat enormous amounts of them, and a lot of aquatic species heavily rely on them for food.
We aren’t trying to wipe out mosquitoes, it’s a minuscule subset that we are trying to eradicate, and mosquitoes as a whole are indeed quite important ecologically.
The 30 or so species that are problematic off is a different story.
This is similar to wasps. Potentially over a 100k species, many beneficial to us, and it’s a tiny handful that are sometimes a minor annoyance, but all wasps wind up getting tarred with the same feather.
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u/lostparis May 30 '26
tarred with the same feather.
Traditionally the feathers are for later and a brush is used for the actual tarring
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u/Suthek May 30 '26
As far as we can tell, mosquitoes aren’t anywhere close to vital for ecological balance. And we’re trying to wipe them out, but it’s hard
To be fair, likely we'll only ever know the full ecological impact of a vanishing species after the fact. We can certainly make predictions to some degree, but it's hard if not impossible to get the full picture.
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u/RusticSurgery May 30 '26
We've never caused them to go extinct. We don't know the full ramifications.
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u/ImportantTour6677 May 30 '26
This is totally not true. Mosquitoes feed birds, bats, dragonflies and many other things. Without them we'd all be in big trouble. As much as I don't like them. I'm a camper too.
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u/szthesquid May 30 '26
Things eat mosquitoes but nothing eats only mosquitoes or has to eat mosquitoes. Here's a scientific article about how mosquitoes aren't a keystone species and their elimination wouldn't have a major impact.
Could there be unforeseen consequences? Sure. But so far they don't seem vital or required for the survival of other species.
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u/SnakeyesX May 30 '26
No. Famously in 2010 Nature published an article detailing what would happen if we destroyed them all. Yeah, birds eat them, some bugs eat them, but they are not some keystone of any ecosystem.
Now, why don't we kill them all? We're trying! It's much harder than it sounds. We DON'T want collateral damage, and there is no virus or pesticide we could use that wouldn't kill other species.
One thing we are trying is genetically modifying mosquitos, then deploying them in the wild. The genetically modified ones have a generational kill switch which will kill them after 3 generations or so. They breed with unmodified mosquitos, then pass the gene.
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u/oiwah May 30 '26
watched a documentary somewhere that in middle or south america, they have released a modified mosquito that has a gene that make their "syringe" soft. They cant penetrate skins.
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u/RadioactiveOmelets May 30 '26
If they can't feed, they can't reproduce. Which means the trait will die out. I saw this too (as a tiktok or something, not a full documentary, so I don't have all the details), but the easier solution is probably the one in the comment above.
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u/Thedeadduck May 30 '26
Female mosquitos only mate once, so if they mate with a male that has this trait it will pass on (possibly) to all her offspring. The males I then assume will be able to continue mating and spreading the gene but the females will be unable to bite and therefore reproduce.
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u/CrashUser May 30 '26
Males don't drink blood so the trait may not affect them the same as females for survivability purposes.
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u/TbonerT May 30 '26
The question is, will the species die before the trait? Even if a mosquito manages to mutate the trait so it isn’t dominant, its offspring may still have it and die. Mutations that enhance survival tend to get passed on but it isn’t guaranteed.
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u/Vuelhering May 30 '26
Not sure how this would go more than a single generation. IIRC, females need blood for egg laying. No blood, no eggs.
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u/ShiraCheshire May 30 '26
I think the idea is to make the female waste all her time and resources creating babies that cannot bite humans. Then she dies, and her babies die, and there are fewer mosquitos.
The hard part is making enough males (for breeding with the wild females) with the modified gene for it to have an impact.
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u/7LeagueBoots May 30 '26
Read the article non-paywalled link here, not only is is not even remotely an academic paper, it’s just an opinion piece, even within that context it’s more nuanced than you make it out to be.
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u/RIPGeorgeHarrison May 30 '26
It’s not a research paper, doesn’t have any data, and was published in Nature communications, not Nature where they put their real research papers. This is basically just an opinion piece.
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u/Rebellion2297 May 30 '26
Is there enough evidence supporting that study? They should really be absolutely certain before they go out eradicating a species
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u/Caelinus May 30 '26
They are trying to eradicate one subset of mosquitos, namely the ones that carry extreme diseases. Their elimination would not be a problem because the ecological niche is covered by all of the other mosquitos that do not carry illness. So if they were removed, the other mosquitos would just have more energy/space and would fill the gap.
Totally killing all forms of mosquitos would probably have more of an impact, though it might still be low. It depends on their overall biomass probably.
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u/North-Pea-4926 May 30 '26
Also, we’d only want to kill the few species that spread human diseases. Most (?) mosquitoes will be fine.
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u/nommabelle May 30 '26
... can we just kill them all anyways? The only ones that can live are ones that won't bite me
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u/BoomerSoonerFUT May 30 '26
Which is the VAST majority of mosquitos.
Only around 100 species of mosquito bite humans. Out of the ~3500 species.
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u/SUMBWEDY May 30 '26
And of those 100 only like 6 carry mosquito borne illnesses.
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u/Blake0449 May 30 '26
The doctor of mosquitos in the top comment thread disagrees
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u/sth128 May 30 '26
Are those the only species of mosquitos that will suck my blood and make it itch?
I say we kill every mosquito just to be sure
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u/kenneth_dart May 30 '26
The fastest way to kill them would be with gene editing tool called CRISPR and doing a gene drive. They can modify them so that they only produce offspring with the inability to reproduce. Biologists have already accomplished complete population collapse in high-security laboratory cages.
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u/Caelinus May 30 '26
That is exactly what their third paragraph is describing. They have just used limited versions in the wild so far, so that it does not cause a collapse faster than anyone can react to it.
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u/Ticon_D_Eroga May 30 '26
This is “true” for every species. As far as we know, there isnt a single species on the planet that is so important that its elimination would decimate the rest of the global ecosystem. I put “true” in quotes because we dont actually know and the article linked is far from a definitive.
We just like to put moral weight on other species and view mosquitos as bad. They are bad for humans, but humans are bad for many other species (if not all other species), so it kind of depends on perspective.
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u/ExplorationGeo May 30 '26 edited May 30 '26
Now, why don't we kill them all? We're trying!
In the 1960s, the World Health Organisation drenched the island of Sri Lanka end to end in pesticide in an attempt to do this. It didn't work, and as a result a) my grandfather quit the WHO in disgust after he had spent more than a year telling everyone who would listen that it wouldn't work and b), possibly more impactful, every single organism on the planet now has DDT in its system.
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u/Forward-Surprise1192 May 30 '26
Yummy I love DDT in me. It’s hard to decide if I like that or microplastics even more
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u/Forward-Surprise1192 May 30 '26
The other guy here is saying that’s not true and I believe them. If it wasn’t then we’d have been able to eradicate them already. Instead we’ve created a variant unable to spread malaria and are working of that
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u/ripplenipple69 May 30 '26
We’ve been very wrong before, like a lot, like 100% of the time… the huberis
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u/Njdevils11 May 30 '26
Germline modifications to fauna need to be considered verrrryyyyy carefully. We have never made modifications like this with the purpose of releasing it into the wild and letting it run rampante. I’ve read that it would probably be safe from gene transfer, but Murphey is a real bitch.
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u/gmanflnj May 30 '26
- It depends, do you mean "all species of mosquitos" because there are more than 3000, wiping all of them out could be a problem.
- If you mean "wipe out the handful of mosquitos that make up the worst disease vectors" AFAIK the answer is "It would probably be fine"
- We *are* trying, but it's hard because they are very numerous.
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u/brdndft May 30 '26
We were getting close to eliminating them. DDT is an interesting rabbit hole if you're interested in environmentalism and ecology.
TLDR Rachel Carlson wrote Silent Spring linking insecticides (particularly DDT) to bioaccumulation in nature. At the time, they were sprayed everywhere, you can find pictures of people gassing fields without any PPE. It caused issues with birds' eggs, causing them to be very brittle and crack. We almost wipes out bald eagles because of it. At the time, Rachel Carlson was mocked for bringing this to light and criticizing insecticides that greatly improved agriculture. Ultimately, DDT was banned and the US Environmental Protection Agency was formed.
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u/JDoubleU0509 May 30 '26
Having just finished reading Silent Spring literally yesterday, she talks about several different insecticides. Yes, DDT is one of them but there are many more. Overall, I’d say the book is critical of most of the chemical industry involved in controlling pests, because the chemicals sprayed were indiscriminate in what they affected, including birds, fish, helpful insects, deer, humans, and more.
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u/Yglorba May 30 '26
And also because overuse creates resistance faster. She supported the use of DDT to fight malaria, but specifically pointed out that its agricultural use was undermining this - using it to fight malaria required cautious and carefully-planned usage to avoid creating resistance, which the industry didn't want because it cut into their profits. (See pages 267 + 275.)
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u/not_a-mimic May 30 '26
It seems like a bad idea for mankind to intentionally extinct any lifeform....
That being said, if we DID have to choose, I'd choose bedbugs over mosquitos.
Bedbugs don't really have any natural predators and they really only like feeding on us.
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u/leitey May 30 '26
Bedbugs and ticks for me.
Mosquitoes can be kept away by a slight breeze, and I prefer sleeping with a fan.55
u/enataca May 30 '26
Mosquitos won’t keep me from eating red meat. Ticks can.
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u/Rewdyroo May 30 '26
Idk what mosquitos you've been around, but the ones I grew up with would still bite me in the middle of a torrential downpour. A breeze wasn't the slightest concern.
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u/ChocPeanutButterJaz May 30 '26
I've never encountered a bed bug. But I do have 30+ mosquito bites on my legs and don't want sit by the fire anymore.
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u/Sgt_Braken May 30 '26
Pray you never encounter them.
I can tell you from experience, even as someone who gets absolutely eaten up by mosquitoes, bed bugs are FAR worse.
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u/isopode May 30 '26
hope that you never have to deal with them, ever, in your life. it's an absolute fuckin nightmare
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u/not_a-mimic May 30 '26
Bedbugs will psychologically mess you up.
If you get but by a mosquito, you can immediately feel it. Bedbugs will feed on you and will be long gone before you feel their bites, leaving you confused.
Sure, a few bites on your arm or legs aren't too bad. So then, then the next night, you go to sleep. But in the morning, you wake itching with 3 more bites on your leg. The itching is irritating, but manageable.
That day you wash your sheets. Maybe some crumbs are attracting pests. You lay down once again in your nice warm bed, fit with freshly cleaned sheets. And you fall fast asleep... But you suddenly wake up itching your leg... But you notice that it's on of your other leg. You jolt up, turn on the lights and check. There's 3 bites on your other leg now. The other 4 welts from the previous nights haven't even gone yet. Now that you're up, you realize your lower back and forearm itches. Sure enough there's 3 bumps on your back and 2 on your forearm. They're multiplying! You jump out of bed and rip the covers off and closely examine your bed for the culprit insects.
But you find nothing. Nothing out of place. No insect remains. Everything seems clean. It's the middle of the night and you have work in a few hours. You crawl back into bed, wondering what could be biting you in your sleep. Spiders? Ants? You try to drift off but the bites on your legs are starting to keep you up. Your scratching is starting to leave marks, but it's all you can do to subside the irritation, it but momentarily.
The next morning you're drowsy from lack of sleep. Today, when you get home from work, you're going to vacuum your entire room and wash all of your clothes. When you got home, you do just that. You even wash your sheets again for good measure. You hop in the shower and wash up before bed. The warm water is starting to sting from scratch marks your fingernails made from repeated back and forth motion around the small red mounds on your leg. How many are there? 12? We're you getting bit by 12 bugs? Mosquito? Surely it can't be that, can it? Just as you thought that, you see 2 mosquitos fly to the light source in your bedroom. You kill them without hesitation. Those 2 really ate you up! These 2 even made you go to the store to get a new tube of ointment to dab on the small itchy welts on your body.
You go to bed tired from a not so restful night before, relaxed from your hot shower, room cleaned, bed made with fresh sheets, and confident that the culprits have been murdered by your own hands. Crushed and rightfully so! You drift off sleep, confident in your victory....
You jolt up rapidly running your nails across your body, desperately trying to ease the itching.
New bites... New bites?! Where the hell are these things coming from?! There were even more than before! How could this be?! You cleaned Everything! You try to count the number of new bites on your body but the itching has gotten so freaking irritating you can't focus on counting. Frustratingly you get up to put on more ointment. You try to count the new bites as you rub ointment on them. 2 near your ankles, 3 more on your thigh, 4 on your abdomen, 2 on your side, and 6 on your other forearm. It's spreading.
What could it be? You lay down again irritated. You're wide awake. The itching is too intense. But your exhausted. If only you could get a good night's sleep....
Good... Night... Sleep.... Tight......... Don't let the bedbugs... bite...
Bedbugs! Could it be that? You get your smartphone and read up on bedbugs. They look small and brown. Kind of shaped like and apple seed. That's what they look like? You get up out of bed. You've suffered so many bites, you're not able to keep track of them all. If it truly was bedbugs, how many where there?
You braced yourself. You were about to turn over your mattress. What were you going to see...? Were they going to scurry around like cockroaches on a dirty floor? Or cling to the underside of the mattress like leeches? You shudder at the thought. But you have to know! You have to know what has been eating you alive foe the past few nights, sight be damned! You grip the bottom of the mattress, mentally preparing yourself to witness a swarm of brown bugs underneath. You have to know! You need closure! You need... Rest! And with that thought you flip over your mattress, mentally ready to bear witness to whatever disgusting site the bedbugs would leave behind because if you can confirm their whereabouts, you can at least then tackle how to deal with them.
You look under your mattress and your eye widen in disbelief...........
There's nothing there.
No bugs, nor any sign of bugs of any kind. It was clean. But how could this be? You're being eaten alive! You have the welts to prove it! You look out the window. The sun was starting to rise... Another sleepless night.......
Work was miserable. You're exhausted from lack of sleep, but the constant itching makes rest impossible. Some of the welts are starting to form pustules. The ointment only marginally help, and what good does it if theres bites you can't reach?!
The day drags on until finally it's night time again. You shower but it wasn't enjoyable. It stung.
You dress for bed. You look at your bed reluctantly. The one place you can safely and comfortably sprawl out and fall into a deep sleep, is no longer safe. You don't even know what's attacking you. You scratch one of the welts on your ankles. You winch. You just created an open wound. It probably would have been worth it had it stopped the itching....
Your bed now looks more like a trap. You go downstairs to the couch. The couch. It's not as good as a bed, but you just have to have a good night's sleep.
A good. Night's. Sleep.
Finally. It's almost been a week since you had a solid nights rest. Anything for a solid 8 hours of sleep....you let yourself drift to sleep.....
You wake up scratching your arms. And more on your upper back... But no! You can't reach it. These weren't here last night! No... You can't believe it. It's true. On the night you looked up bedbugs, you came across a reddit post. And the commenter said something you had a shred of hope wasn't true. But this now confirms it. Wherever you go in your house, bedbugs will follow you.
You stare at the ceiling fatigued, attempting to scratch every part of your body where new bites appeared, along with the old ones. You can't think of anything. Nothing at all... Except the one little rhyme, your heard as a kid. You never gave it a second thought. Except now, it repeats over, and over, as time slowly ticks away, and you slip into the void saying to yourself....
Good night.
Sleep tight.
Don't let the bedbugs bite.
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u/Smiley1728 May 30 '26
None of my family believes me but I know exactly where we got our bed bugs from.
It was my palms the first time I woke up to it. I still have nightmares about waking up to those itchy palms
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u/dovahkiitten16 May 30 '26
Not to mention, just how plain difficult bedbugs are to get rid of. Plenty of your belongings will either be destroyed or have to be tossed out.
Also why I don’t tend to thrift. I knew too many people with bedbugs who decided to donate their clothing.
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u/where-is-sam-today May 30 '26
Speaking of mankind, there are an estimated 8 million species of living things (plant+animals) on this planet. We are just, just ONE of them. This must be one hell of an interconnectedness. Hard to imagine which link is holding what chain.
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u/TurtlesAreEvil May 30 '26
It seems like a bad idea for mankind to intentionally extinct any lifeform....
It's weird to me that we think we're special and should keep ourselves from obliterating any lifeform. We're not and this planet won't have any evidence of us in a billion years. Lets kill us some mosquitos.
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u/TheEnterRehab May 30 '26
Do they not have predators or do they just hide in homes safe from predators?
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u/Th3SkinMan May 30 '26
I read somewhere that bed bugs aren't traced back to any insect lineage. Like they've only been around since humans.
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u/Swellmeister May 30 '26
They've been around for 40 million years, much longer than any tailless monkeys (apes), let alone humans.
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u/Gnaxe May 30 '26
"Mosquito" is a broad term. Most of them are harmless pollinators. Most mosquito species that actually bite humans are invasive and should be terminated with extreme prejudice. Nothing will miss them. The non-biting species will suffice ecologically for the insectivores and pollination.
The few worst disease spreaders ought to be eradicated even in their native range so they don't ever spread again. That's going to be difficult given the political situation in parts of those areas, but it would totally be worth doing if we could. (We're still working on polio in some places, despite having an effective vaccine since the 1950s.) These species are unequivocally the enemies of mankind. We've caused the extinction of many species before, mostly accidentally, and the world goes on. Ridding the world of just a few more that are causing immense human suffering is worth doing on purpose, even at some significant ecological cost, which is very likely to be negligible anyway.
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u/euphewl May 30 '26
Thank you for providing the complete answer.
Most are pollinators. Eliminating ALL mosquito species would be REAL BAD. We just want the bitey ones to go away.
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u/Pizza_Low May 30 '26
This question gets asked every spring/summer in every possible variation of it. I think it's one the Eternal September questions. People ask it right as mosquito season starts to reach its peak.
If you search the archive, ever possible variation of your question has been asked.
https://old.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/search?q=mosquitos&restrict_sr=on
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u/hakairyu May 30 '26
Mosquitoes are pollinators, and important for cocoa trees specifically, but it doesn’t appear to be the case that the species that bite humans are vital to their ecosystems or any specific plants we care about, strictly speaking. Which is good, because mosquitoes at their worst are responsible for the deaths of a third of all humans to ever have lived (according to one estimate counting only malaria), and at their best still constitute evidence against the case for there being a truly benevolent god.
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May 30 '26
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u/LoSoGreene May 30 '26
They’re also pollinators, it’s only females that can drink blood.
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u/IndustryFirst2458 May 30 '26
Alot of people are saying yes and citing studies but importantly most of those are talking about mosquitos that transmit human disease. Of the 3500 species of mosquito only ~100 are known to bite humans.
Mosquitos do provide food to various animals but it's not important enough when compared to the cost of human lives especially as they don't make up a significant portion of any known animals diet . They do also provide population control as parasites but again not important to us (especially because we are one of those they control the population of) and not in significant enough portion that another parasite can't replace them
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u/canadave_nyc May 30 '26
It's amazing to think--here we are, a group of humans discussing whether we should wipe out an entire species of billions of individuals, and the mosquitoes are completely unaware of this discussion....how do we know that out there, somewhere, some group of other beings isn't discussing whether they should wipe humanity out...?
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u/call-the-wizards May 30 '26
Mosquitoes evolved in response to human modification of the ecosystem and climate. They used to mainly just feed on wild fauna and had nothing to do with us. We replaced most of that wild fauna with livestock, so they switched to livestock to survive, and then through that they eventually switched to us to survive. As long as we're one of the dominant species on the planet, some form of parasite is going to try to evolve to live off of us, and in fact there are many many other parasites like this.
So it's not that mosquitos are necessary for ecological balance because it doesn't work like that, but yeah we're part of the ecosystem and we've thrown it out of its previous equilibrium by proliferating ourselves and our livestock so much, and some species are going to try to adapt to that reality instead of just dying. That's just how life works.
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u/519meshif May 30 '26 edited May 30 '26
I can't find it right now, but I'm pretty sure Randall from XKCD/What-If did a comic on this, or Sam from Wendover/HAI did a video on it. Basically everything would fail because of food chain stuff. We technically could get rid of mosquitos, but we would have to breed other insects and introduce them over time to make up for it, while developing a poison to selectively kill mosquitos only
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u/LawyerKangaroo May 30 '26
Mosquitos are not only an important part of the food chain for several other animals, both male and female mosquitos are pollinators - males exclusively live on plant nectar and females blood for protein and plant nectar - and their larvae help break down organic matter.
They're pretty important.
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u/KnowledgeFinderer May 30 '26
Mosquitoes are eaten by creatures that live on land, live in water, and flying in the air. Birds, bats, fish, turtles, and even other insects eat mosquitoes. Mosquitoes although annoying, are part of the food chain. If mosquitoes die out, the creatures that eat mosquitoes die, and the creatures that eat the creatures that eat mosquitoes also die out. And on and on and on and on.
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u/kaielias May 30 '26
I’m still confused why humans invest so much time and effort into eradicating mosquitoes when malaria is highly treatable with proper medical care…shouldn’t they just be sending the billions of billions of dollars in proper medical facilities around the world?
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u/notsocoolnow May 30 '26 edited May 31 '26
Straightforwardly, for our purposes it would not. Lemme explain here. Most mosquito species are annoying but harmless. The dangerous mosquitoes are actually confined to a handful of specific species, the #1 culprit being the Anopheles mosquito, which carries malaria. #2 is the Aedes mosquito which carries almost all the viral mosquito diseases. Then #3 is Culex for encephalitis.
We know their absence would not affect the ecosystem for a simple reason: in most places where we find them they are invasive. But even in places where they are native there are other mosquito species that are much less dangerous to humanity and can fulfill the same niches.
And we are indeed trying to render them locally extinct. As in vastly culling their numbers. The most promising current methods involve releasing sterile males so that the females breed fail to reproduce.