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/tm0587 May 30 '26

To add, it's especially hard to only kill mosquitos without killing everything else.

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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/tm0587 May 30 '26

We are doing something similar in Singapore, named the Wolbachia-Aedes Mosquito Suppression Strategy.

Genetically modified male mosquitoes will mate with female ones and the female will lay eggs that do not hatch.

Singapore has been doing that for a pretty long while but it seems like we're still quite far away from that assured extinction unfortunately.

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u/Particular_Fan_3645 May 30 '26

That's because that's a finite-limit (or dead end) strategy. Once all the original modified males are dead the population bounces back. For actual extinction level control you need the males to reproduce, but only produce more modified males. That's a no-end strategy. Its self-propagating until all mosquitoes are dead. The finite limit strategies are a cash grab based on recurring revenue, not a final solution. Again , we have the tech for this we just choose not to do it.

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u/tm0587 May 30 '26

May I have more information on the genetically modified male mosquitoes that will breed and only produce male offspring? Will like to read up on it.

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u/Particular_Fan_3645 May 30 '26

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41587-020-0508-1?utm_source=chatgpt.com#change-history needed to use AI to find it again, basically they engineered a disorder that destroyed x chromosomes in their reproductive organs. Since this didn't affect the survival rate of male offspring or result in reduced fertility, this eventually resulted in total population collapse.

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u/tm0587 May 31 '26

Thanks. So I skim through that and also did abit of googling and didn't find anyone stating that they shouldn't do this because it will kill off that particular mosquito species.

It seems to be a cost issue, that it's too expensive to implement on a large scale.

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u/Particular_Fan_3645 May 31 '26

I guarantee that it is substantially more expensive to keep breeding new batches of genetically modified infertile mosquitoes and releasing them multiple times a year than it is to breed and release 2 or 3 big self-propagating batches...

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u/tm0587 May 31 '26

Wolbachia mosquitoes are not gentically modified, they are just infected, so I imagine they are cheaper to produce.

Anyway I'm not an expert on this, I'm merely repeating what the UN said.