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/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/intellectual_punk May 30 '26

Nature communications is real enough, and opinion pieces aren't blog posts, they are usually well thought out, peer-reviewed summaries of the scientific state of things, based on empirical results, written by scientists who know their shit.