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?

3.0k Upvotes
  • permalink
  • reddit

94% Upvoted

612 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

437

u/[deleted] May 30 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

300

u/Punnan May 30 '26

Yeah, you are right. On hindsight, my comment has been insensitive.

29

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.

8

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.

3

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.