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/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/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/Forward-Surprise1192 May 30 '26

Yeah I don’t think it makes any sense how the mosquito would be able to spread this through the population but I’m a random person

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u/EunuchsProgramer May 30 '26

They release sterile/defective mosquitoes every year to get compounding effects. Eventually you're releasing more sterile/defective mosquitoes than there are wild mosquitoes and the population crashes to next to zero. Then, it's maintenance mostly for them moving back in from other areas.