Countless species are already going extinct all the time, both known to us and completely unknown to us, and both "naturally" and from human impact, and no one really cares.
Here's a rare case of a species that there is very good reason to deliberately get rid of, and suddenly people care and object, a lot!?
Of course there's justifiable skepticism and a long, sorry history of unintended consequences of introducing, eradicating or in any way modifying a species or its behavior, but seriously, read up on it, this is not one of those species, pretty much everyone who knows anything about it (including otherwise very environmentally minded people who as a rule would never, ever agree with deliberately eradicating anything) agrees it can be eradicated with no meaningful impact on the ecosystem. (and yes, that includes even the armchair criticism from cynical misanthropes who consider human deaths resulting from this species a good thing "because humans are bad for the environment" - while these mosquitoes do cause a lot of human deaths, the environmental "benefit" of those deaths are completely meaningless in the grand scheme of things)
I think we live in a pretty skeptical and critical age. There are plenty of decently-educated people ready to jump into any discussion and either a) share their contrary opinion, regardless of the basis for it, or b) point out weaknesses/downsides/concerns as a "contribution" to the conversation.
I don't mean to claim that this is always bad or inappropriate. Just that it's the in thing to do these days.
I also find people make dichotomies out of every topic, and lump everyone into the extreme ends of each view. This turns every discussion into a Team A vs Team B win or lose scenario, which just isn't how most things work.
Two ideas can be perfectly valid at the same time, even if they conflict on some points, and the ideas likely exist on a spectrum of possible views with neither Team A or Team B truly being at the logical conclusion of their ideologies.
Likewise, it's perfectly valid to know something is good for the environment on paper, yet still "feel" like it's the wrong thing. Humans are not calculators, and whether or not you'll get the right outcome from going by your feelings, you're fully entitled to them all the same.
Sadly I think you're right. People who have an intuitive, intense opposition reaction to this idea probably think anyone who advocates it are literally Jurassic Park style insane evil villains who want to genetically destroy the planet and make money doing it. Or something. And it's just not true, but changing anyone's mind about that is probably impossible.
I think that people who automatically frame every disagreement into a narrative of “two extremist parties making false dichotomies out of every topic” are profoundly confused. Specifically in issues that are actionable (as most issues are, as this one is), there is a true dichotomy with relevance to action: you either do something, or you don’t. There is simply no middle ground.
What’s so extreme about disagreeing with releasing genetically modified organisms into the wild? Even if a person believed that some combination of both options should be done instead, that person would still, by the end of the day, decide to disagree with releasing genetically modified mosquitoes in the wild as it is currently being done precisely because it is not how they believe it should be done. The extremists-fighting-over-false-dichotomies narrative is honestly so tired and lazy, IMO.
>you either do something, or you don’t. There is simply no middle ground.
Only in the narrowest sense.
Another valid response is "you can't do this as-is, but if you make changes X, Y and Z then you can."
Or "do more experiments with captive populations first."
Or "do this in an area where it's less likely to cause unexpected side effects (eg an unpopulated island somewhere)"
Or "use a different set of genes or tweaks"
It's pretty rare that the _only_ possible choices are to do this _one exact thing_, or do nothing at all.
This is all a huge leap from what I said, which is that given action A, you can only either do it or not do it. That does not mean doing nothing at all and not thinking of other options, and that is why framing the disagreement as nothing more than binary thinking is shallow and lazy and wrong. People may ultimately be divided between for and against, but people who are against one thing may be for some other solution to the problem.
You may think it’s narrow, but whenever you can decide between yes or no on an action all arguments considered, that could just mean that the action itself is clear and specific, as in this case.
70 years ago (roughly, may be inexact), everyone who also "knows anything about it" said it was a fantastic idea to spray our kids with DDT.
I wish I could pin down the reasoning to explain why I feel this is wrong, but intuition is the only thing I have to go on, even as heavily discounted that is in this day and age.
Mosquitos are horrible little devils, and we swat every one we can and destroy their habitats when we find them. Glad to see you at least have a seed of skepticism in you. Humans are notoriously bad at playing god.
Humans are in fact, really good at playing god over long periods of time.
You can look at any metric of human wellbeing over the past 1000 years and the results are dramatic.
Take child mortality for example. In the 18th century, the average family suffered the deaths of 3-4 of their children before they reached adulthood.
Then, from 1800 to 1950, global childhood mortality dropped from 43% to 22%.
Accelerating further, from 1950 to 2015, global child mortality dropped again by nearly 5X to just 4.5%. And it's still going down. [1]
The reasons for this are numerous. Reductions in famine through agriculture, beating disease with medicine, reducing War through economic interdependency, expanding education and access to information through digital technology, etc. While we make mistakes in the short term , in the long term, we tend to get stuff right.
The problem is, we're also really good at getting distracted by bad news stories while missing the big picture. And we LOVE the idea of humans being the cause of the end of the world for some reason. It's the basis of most of our religions.
Of course, the arc of progress is paved with setbacks. But before getting pessimistic and cynical because you read some bad news stories, it pays to zoom out a little.
Humans have been pretty good at improving their lives, but not so good at doing it sustainably. I'm not very impressed until we get the climate change under control and build an economy that isn't dependent on fossil fuels.
I suppose if we love the idea of humans being the cause of the end of the world, it is because we are the only thing on the planet capable of causing the end of the world, such as it is. This is the result of science. Maybe you could call it scientism, if one needs something to which to ascribe a bogeyman or create division.
I am not ungrateful for our current actualization. Getting here took (and continues to take) tremendous sacrifice.
I really think you give humans too much credit here. The world has been here for billions of years, and will be here for billions more. Even if we bombed ourselves to extinction, in another million years there'd be little more to mark our passing than some fossils and a few hunks of concrete.
You're ignoring the spirit of OP's statement, and your sort of weird argument always pops up in this kind of discussion. Yes, obviously, we won't blow the absolute planet up. Maybe animals and plants will survive past us in some fashion. Maybe, even if we all die, there will come a day when a new evolutionary tract brings a human-like thing back to the world.
BUT the spirit is:
>we are the only thing on the planet capable of causing the end of the world, such as it is.
Meaning, we are the only thing on the planet capable of willingly causing our own extinction. This, for all intents and purposes, is the end of the world. World, again, in this context refers to humans and the human experiment.
I don't get the argument that "oh, you mean the death of all humans, the planet will be fine". How is that better? We still all die.
Naaa, look at what we achieved in a couple hundred years.. And the rate and scale of our "successes" keep increasing (exponentially?). Give us another couple hundred years and I'm sure no fossils (or anything else) will be found.
But I think gp meant the end of the world as the end of survivable conditions for humans. Nobody cares if the planet is still here after we are gone.
You seem to focus a lot on fossil fuels. Have you reviewed the latest findings of the IPBES regarding the state of biodiversity? Fossil fuels and climate change are small factors when you consider all things. And the ongoing collpase of biodiversity is far more dangerous today than climate change.
If you zoom out again, humans are the only hope for the survival of all multi-cellular earth life in general.
The sun will destroy earth in 2-5 billion years. But before then, an asteroid will likely destroy all most/all life on earth in the next couple hundred million years or so. And before that, a super volcano will likely destroy most/all of the animal and plant life on earth.
Assuming human technology advances fast enough to avoid catastrophic climate change and MAD succeeds at keeping us from destroying the earth ourselves , we're the only species that has a shot at making any "not-human-centric ecosystem" survive beyond earth.
(ignoring any life that may exist outside our solar system)
Of course, 22 Billion years from now the entire universe might die and kill everything anyways, but we may end up giving Bambi & friends a few billion years of existence they wouldn't have otherwise had. So I'd call that a net gain.
Scientists have troubles envisioning a sustainable world in the coming decades (due to the ongoing, human-driven, accelerating collapse of biodiversity) but somehow we may save the world in millions of years? See IPBES report for a summary.
Maybe we should focus on the pressing and critical issues instead of worsening them in the hope that a distant event could justify our suicidal behavior.
Seems we're already working on fixing the problem, no? Hence why the IPBES report exists!
But if this modern narrative of "We've angered the gods!" makes you feel good, I'm not sure anything I can say will refute your certainty about our coming doom.
"A new study reports continued climate-altering carbon emissions and intensive land use have inadvertently greened half of the Earth’s vegetated lands. Green leaves convert sunlight to sugars, thus providing food, fiber and fuel, while replacing carbon dioxide (CO2) in the air with water. The removal of heat-trapping CO2 and wetting of air cools the Earth’s surface. Global greening since the early 1980s may have thus reduced global warming, possibly by as much as 0.25oC, reports the study “Characteristics, drivers and feedbacks of global greening” published in the inaugural issue of the journal Nature Reviews Earth and Environment. Two of the authors, Dr. Jarle W. Bjerke and Dr. Hans Tømmervik works at Norwegian Institute for Nature Research at the Fram Centre in Tromsø, Norway."
It’s impossible to measure that kind of net gain, because the very idea of “gain” is subjective, existing only in our own mind.
Is plastic waste good or bad for the environment? Is more forestation a gain or a loss?
Such question cannot be answered without factoring in a human perspective. (Or some conscious things’ perspective, but either way, “the environment” has no perspective as it has no goal or objective)
You may be correct. However, human population will peak in the next couple of decades or so. Combine that with modest future technological advancements and we may easily reach an equilibrium.
And even if not, absent humans ever existing, the destruction of all life on earth is still a statistical certainty due to the fragility of earth.
So, thinking long term again, we're the only shot life as we know it has at outliving this place.
We may destroy earth ourselves before then, but I think the will-they-or-won't-they technological race against time will be more entertaining than if we went back to hunter-gatherer society and waited a few million years for the next asteroid to inevitably end us, no?
> our current population level is already unsustainable.
[Citation needed].
People have been saying this since the 18th Century, and yet we continue to find ways to support our growing population. There’s enormous swathes of the Earth that remain untouched and unused—the carrying capacity of the planet is much higher than our current population level.
You can get argumentative about what the carrying capacity of Earth is. To me, it's the point in which resources are consumed faster than they're produced or replenished.
What resources? Pick any resource... fossil water, topsoil, fish, oil, etc. It's the same situation no matter what resource you pick. Plus, we have built a dependency on many non-renewable resources.
By that definition, we are already beyond carrying capacity.
Every population that grows exponentially will double over a period of time. The last doubling that starves everyone off has 50% of available resources left.
You think you have a lot of resources left, the truth is you are about to starve in a few decades. Personally, I don't have to prove you wrong. You will prove yourself wrong when in a few decades as you look for food, or become the food of another human looking for food.
The real danger is preserving and defending the irrationality behind the status quo.
While rational people care about the environment, irrational self-centered people celebrate Burning Man, travel around the world for conferences that could be done online and buy thousands of single use plastic items for Halloween only to throw them away the next day.
Reduce, reuse, recycle. In that order. Take the environment into consideration when making decisions.
Everyone knows what they have to do. Fucking do it.
No more fucking unjustified air travel (is your family dying? no? then don't fucking travel), excessive packaging, single use plastics for non medical reasons, stupid events that can be done online, no more snail mail spam. No more bullshit.
Did you travel to an exotic destination this year? I don't fucking care. I do care about the environment though.
Send polluters to jail, ruin them economically, shame the fuck out of them. Your value as perceived by society should not be how much you pollute or help destroy the environment.
Fuck marketing, fuck buying shit you do not need, fuck the narcissism and vanity. Live within fucking environmental budgets.
Somewhat ironically, the consumption you decry here is what powers the economy that, in turn, funds advancements that make our living more sustainable.
Are you aware that there were cultures here in the Americas that were able to preserve the environment intact for 10,000 years?
Ironically, the new arrivals here claim that Native Americans were somehow unproductive and mismanaged their territory with inefficient farming practices. Well, those claims will not age very gracefully once all the aquifers are pumped dry and soil finally becomes sterile in a few decades. All of it, in about 500 years. Good job.
None of the "advancements" you mention are actually necessary, or can actually be called advancements. For something to be called an advancement it would need to be better that what preceded it. How is precisely a global clusterfuck/extinction event better than what existed before? How can being decades away from total ecological collapse be better than living in a fucking paradise full of biodiversity in perfect ecological balance?
The only advancement necessary to achieve sustainability is keeping your ego in check and have a reciprocal relationship with nature.
Go to an Indian reservation and listen to the people who managed to survive here for 10,000 years without causing a cascading ecological disaster. Try to understand the philosophical differences between your culture and theirs, and understand which of those differences cause you to destroy the environment instead of preserving it for future generations.
The planet cannot sustain 7.5 billion people over long periods of time let alone more than that.
Believe whatever you want, really. You seem to be in denial about all this because your lifestyle requires everyone to believe shit is OK. It is not OK.
And because it is not OK everyone will eventually pay the price of not working together to avoid a cascading environmental catastrophe. Namely war and famine.
The unpopularity of my responses here really reflects how abstracted from reality people are these days.
Trouble is, that peak number keeps going up. I remember learning in school that it was 8 billion, now it's 10. You have to look over time, in 10 years it might 11, but yeah we're definitely going to peak any time now. An-ny time now. And even if/when we do, having more old people than young will cause a load of other problems which we don't seem to be preparing for. Most economies seem to be built (to my inexpert eye) on having more net producers (workers) than net consumers (pensioners, kids, sick people, unemployed). It needs to change.
You need to dig deeper. More and more countries are slowing down. That growth left is in a smaller and smaller number of countries.
Which makes it, cynically, sustainable. When every country is growing out of a control, that's a worldwide disaster. When a bunch of countries are growing out of control... that's a local disaster. There's a reason we have countries/states/defense mechanisms.
> The net world population is going up. Any non-zero growth rate will eventually saturate the planet.
There's a huge difference between "saturating" 10 years from now or 1000 years from now.
And population growth has slowed down to a crawl. It's enough to bring just a dozen, or less, countries out of poverty to achieve basically zero growth.
> We are already beyond capacity.
We are not.
> causing each person to boost their resource consumption.
Overconsumption is a problem, and should definitely be solved.
>Humans are in fact, really good at playing god over long periods of time.
Hundreds of millions of murdered and poisoned people would likely disagree with you, if they hadn't been murdered and poisoned by humans who were playing god.
Less than a century ago we had a nation-state that believed in Eugenics and actively murdered millions of people under the guise of advancing science. I find it a bit shocking that some people can gloss over that and that somehow we have changed as a species in less than 80 years.
This is an oversimplification. If used as a limited last resort it can do more good than harm (which is why e.g. the WHO still recommends using it). DDT is very effective and has certainly saved a lot of lives by preventing malaria infections. But if used carelessly it can do a lot of harm, and various groups of experts who have studied the question have come to the conclusion that its use should be dramatically curtailed, and replaced where possible by other methods of malaria control.
DDT causes fertility problems, birth defects, cancer, etc. to humans, as well as environmental damage.
(Malaria also kills a ton of people, and we should be investing more resources in fighting it, ideally without resorting to heavy DDT use.)
DDT is not known to have reproductive effects or cause cancer in humans. Please do your research and be careful about sources because there is a LOT of misinformation out there.
Moreover: we know from observation that DDT has severe effects on numerous wildlife species -- some of them intended, many not. It would be highly surprising for humans to be immune to these effects.
Sounds like you did the research care to share your sources for that. Otherwise I'm sticking with my sources that day DDT does cause cancer and birth defects. See Wikipedia article on DDT linked by someone else.
Science dogma strikes again. Science can’t predict anything with absolute certainty, I’m quite skeptical of the idea that a prediction about a system this complex could be made with even a “very good” level of certainty. But when it comes to communicating science to the public, the only message that can be put forward is one of perfectly unanimous, absolute certainty. The people are too stupid to make their own judgements, so they must not be given the opportunity.
Thats an interesting stance for sure. Unfortunately this kind of approach is flawed and will sow contempt in the populace against the government, resulting eventually in riots & overthrow
I was being a bit facetious. I was criticizing what I view to be the shortcomings in contemporary science communication, and I would suggest that you can already see how it has resulted in contempt and mistrust directed towards our institutions.
Interesting they integrated diesel trucks and assault rifles so centrally into their existence. I'm sure those were not around in the original colonies.
If the goal was to eradicate all mosquitos, I would see the ecological risks. But here it's about just one specific species of mosquitos which only represents 4% of the local population, and the widely used alternative is insecticides, which are damaging to so many different insects. Reducing the need fir insecticides looks like a worthy goal.
Save the bees, kill the Aedes aegypti mosquitoes. Though I think Disneyland will still spray for mosquitoes even if they don't carry Zika. I doubt that it'll seriously reduce spraying (unless this becomes an alternative to spraying) but I'll go with the scientists that studied this.
I'm also kinda curious if this could help eradicate invasive species. I'd imagine it'd take longer with species that don't reproduce as fast as mosquitoes.
Years ago I would have agreed with you but they have been studying the possible impact of mosquito eradication for over a decade now. And it looks like they can do it with minimal impact. Off with their heads!
I encourage everyone to read up on it themselves. Other commenters have already pointed out this species is invasive everywhere outside Africa, constitutes only a tiny fraction of the mosquito population where they exist, and doesn't fill any meaningful ecological role anywhere.
> considering this has never been done before
But that's the point, it kind of has. Countless species are going extinct all the time. The only thing different about this case is it's deliberate and using a scary sounding means.
Even talking only about deliberate mosquito eradication, we've been doing that for a long, long time too, overwhelmingly with far more devastating methods than this targeted one.
That's already a thing. They fog the streets at night in the closest town to where I live, in the summer. Consequences - every bug dies as well as mosquitoes. This seems slightly more targeted than that approach.
Actually this exact approach has already been used to great effect for several years in south america. And if you google there are a lot of pop science stories with scientists saying they fill no noche and are fine to eliminate. Only found one saying we should keep them. Some guy from perdue.
Isn't South America already losing biodiversity at a rapid pace? Seems like it could be difficult to separate the effects of an experiment like this from the steady background of biodiversity loss already present across the continent.
It seems unlikely to me that any creature could have existed in an ecosystem for tens of millions of years without evolving into some sort of important niche. Obviously I could be wrong here, but the claim that we can just eliminate them with zero repercussions strikes me as a bit of scientific arrogance. Nature is a complex dynamic system, how could we possibly know what unexpected side-effects might occur when we tamper with it?
> existed in an ecosystem for tens of millions of years without evolving into some sort of important niche
These mosquitos are a man-brought invasive species, so that argument doesn't fly.
+ You're already mentioning we don't know what effect species going extinct can have... But that's the point, countless species are already going extinct anyway, there's literally zero reason why you would worry or care more about keeping this one.
That biodiversity loss is primarily species in the shrinking rainforests. These mosquitoes are released in major cities and don't have measurable impacts on populations far outside those cities. It is easy to imagine something going wrong. When the scientists are saying don't do something, we all say "trust the scientific consensus", but when that consensus says "nah its fine" we distrust them.
Not exactly a citation but there is strong evidence that mosquitos evolved to follow people. Their main niche in the environment, then, is predating humans; they are eaten by other things but only if humans don't kill or displace them first.
And in fact many of those disastrous attempts to modify the ecosystem have also been aimed at killing mosquitos, notably the draining of swamps in Northern Israel. Having more precise mechanisms will not only allow the same interventions to happen with less collateral damage, but will also let us get much more experience on the specific attempts of adding and removing species.
I cannot tell you how refreshing it is that this is the top comment. Discussion around these sorts of articles is almost always railroaded with the objections that you've mentioned. While I agree that it's human nature to be skeptical, I don't see how it's a foregone conclusion that nature is always right and that certain disease-carrying mosquitos and homo sapiens should have to exist simultaneously. We know conclusively that evolution doesn't always make the correct decision, one only needs to examine the human eye or appendix to know this to be true.
There's an episode of The Magic School Bus (the original one, from the 90s) where a cacao farmer eradicates mosquitos and the cacao trees stop producing cacao beans. The episode ends with the reintroduction of the mosquitoes, and you get to eat chocolate again.
So you've got at least one generation that grew up on the message that mosquitoes are a species that you don't eradicate, or else, no more chocolate. And that's a simple enough message that people would feel comfortable making public comment to that effect.
This type of Sterile Male method for mosquito contol has been quite extensively studied. I think there is much literature/experimental results in this approach from the past 50 years.
"... somewhere in the region of 150 million to 300 million people have died from the effects of malaria during the past 100 years. If it is taken that around 6,000 million people have died during this period, malaria may be reckoned to have been a factor in between 2 and 5% of all deaths across the planet in the 20th century." [0]
Surprisingly my reasons for not eradicating pests like mosquitoes and tsetse flies is that these insects protect natural environments from human encroachment. Remove these pest, makes it easier for humans to enter and region, then do untold environmental damage.
Historically ignorant cynical misanthropy that at the end of the day, still condemns millions to disease and billions to poverty in the name of some nebulous environment.
Humans are the ones who brought Aedes aegypti, yellow fever, and the malaria parasites to the “natural environment” of the Americas in which >100,000,000 people lived prior to contact.
Yellow fever came with the English colonists from their infested coastal marsh natural environment (where people lived).
Parasites from their slaves, taken from their malarial natural environments (where people lived).
Imported into the New World, helping kill 90% of the people who already lived there, perpetuating the use of chattel slaves thought less susceptible to “fevers and ague”.
One of the single most important components to the Colombian Exchange, the idea of mosquito borne disease protecting any natural environments from human encroachment at this point is borderline delusional / actively malicious.
I'm not surprised at this argument at all, it's guaranteed to come up given the nature of hacker news commenters.
Which is why I said
even the armchair criticism from cynical misanthropes who consider human deaths resulting from this species a good thing "because humans are bad for the environment" - while these mosquitoes do cause a lot of human deaths, the environmental "benefit" of those deaths are completely meaningless in the grand scheme of things)
"> ... Of course there's justifiable skepticism and a long, sorry history of unintended consequences ..."
"> ... that includes even the armchair criticism from cynical misanthropes ..."
NN Taleb's Black Swan, Antifragile are must-reads for any engineer with an "opinion" about the "reliability" and "soundness" of science, that they really ought to read before doing the "well-ack-shu-ally": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Black_Swan:_The_Impact_of_...
> Countless species are already going extinct all the time, both known to us and completely unknown to us, and both "naturally" and from human impact, and no one really cares.
Many people care, only those that have financial gain to make from this state of affair choose to ignore it.
I care deeply, everyone does! The question is, out of all the species that go extinct on literally a daily basis, why on god's green earth would you pick this one to protect? What is it about it that is so vital we can't afford to lose it?
>while these mosquitoes do cause a lot of human deaths, the environmental "benefit" of those deaths are completely meaningless in the grand scheme of things
Benefit to whom? What is the grand scheme of things?
>pretty much everyone who knows anything about it (including otherwise very environmentally minded people who as a rule would never, ever agree with deliberately eradicating anything) agrees it can be eradicated with no meaningful impact on the ecosystem
The hubris in this statement is absolutely stunning and, ironically, the perfect example of why we, as an extremely limited, ignorant, species of upright apes should not be exterminating other species because we think we have it all figured out.
We're already inadvertently causing the extinction of countless species anyway. What is it about this one that's so vital we can't afford to lose this one?
> The hubris in this statement is absolutely stunning and, ironically, the perfect example of why we, as an extremely limited, ignorant, species of upright apes should not be exterminating other species because we think we have it all figured out.
How are we extremely limited and ignorant? As far as we know (and with zero counter-evidence), we are the most capable, most knowledgeable species in the entire universe. We reign supreme. In fact, the only logical reason we shouldn't exterminate other species for our benefit, is if doing so somehow harms us in some different and greater way.
You do realize this is an invasive species that doesn't even belong in the ecosystem in question? Would you also oppose controlling fox and deer populations in Australia?
I'm much more concerned because this is a species that is very closely tied to human interactions.
Having -potentially- genetically modified organisms sucking my blood and introducing who knows what into my blood stream is non-ideal.
We've also got an incredibly bad record of fucking with ecological systems: See basically all of austrailia (Cane Toads, European Rabbit, Feral Goats, etc).
I'm just pointing out we don't have a great track record of introducing a species to positively affect ecosystems.
> Now, a team of independent researchers analyzing an early trial of Oxitec’s technology is raising alarm—and drawing fire from the firm—with a report that some offspring of the GM mosquitoes survived and produced offspring that also made it to sexual maturity.
> Typically, a female only needs to mate once, and after this is done, she can lay eggs for the remainder of her life. Most female mosquitoes can produce between 50 and 500 eggs in their first brood. Subsequent broods may have fewer eggs, but a single female mosquito may produce up to 10 broods throughout her life.
I'm not convinced this is the best solution. Bring back the anti-mosquito lasers :/
Here's a rare case of a species that there is very good reason to deliberately get rid of, and suddenly people care and object, a lot!?
Of course there's justifiable skepticism and a long, sorry history of unintended consequences of introducing, eradicating or in any way modifying a species or its behavior, but seriously, read up on it, this is not one of those species, pretty much everyone who knows anything about it (including otherwise very environmentally minded people who as a rule would never, ever agree with deliberately eradicating anything) agrees it can be eradicated with no meaningful impact on the ecosystem. (and yes, that includes even the armchair criticism from cynical misanthropes who consider human deaths resulting from this species a good thing "because humans are bad for the environment" - while these mosquitoes do cause a lot of human deaths, the environmental "benefit" of those deaths are completely meaningless in the grand scheme of things)