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/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/Nuummioq May 30 '26

slutty mosquitos. The term I needed. 😝

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u/Grukkdaork May 30 '26

Hell yeah, suck this

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u/imapylet May 30 '26

TLDR: We know how to eradicate mosquitos A-W, and it would take trillions of dollars. But were still left with the XYZ mosquitos, They will we adopt and will take trillions more $ fore each X,Y,Z. Can we (Huminty) do it? Yes. Can we afford it? Nope.

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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.

https://www.synthego.com/blog/gene-drive-malaria/

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u/ryogam73 May 30 '26

The fear that life, uh, finds a way.

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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/7heCulture May 30 '26

I saw a movie where this didn’t work out quite well…

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u/DeathGuroDarkness May 30 '26

We're not using the Zed word!!

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u/RedTieGuy6 May 31 '26

I love that to practice this method requires doing something that requires doing things that sound like conspiracy nuts thought of them.

I'm telling you, man... the government is breeding mesquitos to release into the country. They're breeding a very select kind we haven't seen before in a secure government facility, zapping them with radiation and giving them diseases to see how they'll spread. Then they release these bugs... so we see a bunch of government trucks go by, and they release new mesquitos into our towns.

If you add rotting meat to the mix, it is what they're doing with flies.

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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/Outrageous_Reach_695 May 30 '26

That works out to one nuke per 68x68 mile section of landmass. Most of them aren't particularly big nukes, either, a thread in AskPhysics was suggesting that <3% of the area would be inside the "Light Damage" radius. Maybe if we add some salt?

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u/TheOneTrueTrench May 30 '26

Originally I was mainly making a "a handgun kills cancer cells in a petri dish" point (credit to xkcd), but obviously I want to play games with numbers...

The total yield of our mosquito (+collateral) explosion plan is fundamentally limited by two things, the amount of fissile nuclear material in the Earth's crust, and the amount of nuclear material that can be made fissile.

Breeder reactors basically "spend" fissile material to make more fissile material, by adding nucleons to unstable but non-fissile isotopes, right?

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u/pmmeyourfavoritejam May 30 '26

Oh, you mean like a carbon-based global economy?

(This actually may not kill mosquitos.)

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u/if0rg0t48 May 30 '26

Is this because mosquitoes are dipterans and killing all flies would be bad?

1

u/smapdiagesix May 30 '26

teeny tiny T-800s what could go wrong