Serious question, is there anything good about mosquitos? They're famously the most 'dangerous' organisms to humans thanks to their spread of malaria, and per the article at least some species are tailored to prey on humans over other animals. Their spit is what makes you itchy, and when they need to detach from your skin they piss on you to make it easier.
I once saw an article asking biologists this very question. I wish I could find it.
What I recall is:
* some species of mosquitos are an important part of ecosystems, e.g. a big chunk of biomass in tundra regions. (I didn't even know there were any mosquitos there!)
* but the specific species that carry malaria: no. They gave some general platitudes about niches and every species being important... Almost. These ones, kill them all. The important stuff these mosquitos do can be done by other insects.
Edit: https://www.nature.com/articles/466432a looks pretty similar to what I read. Either this one is slightly more nuanced or my memory dropped some of the nuance.
yes... I come from the tropics. I have always fantasized abput escaping to Alaska where 'there would be no mosquitoes'. But then I saw Grizzly Man. More frightening than the bear was the fact that the couple were wearing nets to cover their faces from mosquitoes.
Only on a short term basis. As the snow is melting, this creates a large number of small, shallow ponds where mosquitoes can breed without being eaten by fish. As the year progresses, these ponds dry up, reducing habitat to those permanent lakes which likely have fish present that predate the water part of the mosquito lifecycle. Moreover, there is a lag introduced by the predator-prey dynamics, in particular short lived species like dragonflies and mosquito hawks that predate the flying stage. Thus, it can take a few weeks for these predators to start reducing the number of mosquitoes.
Source: I’m hiking the Pacific Crest Trail and I have been swarmed by mosquitoes on several occasions. Mosquitoes were particularly bad in Yosemite in late June and Washington in early August; mosquitoes are finally letting up now that theses processes are taking place. Let me just say mosquitoes make the most of that interval before predators dominate.
Yeah exactly. Beetles, worms, and fungi do the job quite nicely. We don’t need mosquitoes at all. When they’re gone other species will pick up the slack.
If you take selfish human-only view, nothing good there. But there is tons of them and they are important part of food chain even if they are tiny.
If we could selectively just eliminate those 2-3 sub-species that transfer malaria, dengue and say zika or yellow fever from human perspective the negative impact on environment compared to positive impact on often weakest and poorest part of mankind if... well incomparable. Ecosystem would take a hit but I can't seriously put half a million of human lives yearly, often small children, against some blip in our environment, which would in few years balance itself out into new equilibrium (probably with more insect of some other type taking the place) and choose insects.
What I would eliminate outright without any remorse are ticks. They are not that important in food chain, and are scourge for both humans and many animals.
For one thing, mosquitoes live an entire life underwater before emerging into flight. Most of the time people ask this question, they forget that part about how much underwater life mosquitoes feed and how much they contribute to the biome there.
Its clear that "good" or "bad" in this context means if it helps in any way any other species (including us) or environment, and given that it stings a lot of animals causing them some pain it already has some points on "bad".
> it stings a lot of animals causing them some pain
Isn't pushing back on animals, in particular apex predator types, "good" in some natural sense. Making areas uninhabitable (except I assume for species that have evolved, or will evolve, some kind of symbiosis) seems like an important role. Any lifeform that gets an open field will just grow until they run out of food or invite disease or whatever. Unfavorable parasites or whatever you want to call them are an important part of the balance, even if they are clearly bad from the perspective of whoever they're feeding on.
good is what help maintaining life as a whole, so a human with a high carbon footprint is more bad than good, but a lizard or a bird plays a role in the ecosystem, and at least doesn't have a negative pollution impact, so they're not bad
trees: that's the symbol of life, of usefulness, they help to improve life in the ground and around, hold humidity, store carbon for most of them, are homes of many species, provide food, ...
dogs or any pets: not useful at all for the ecosystem, actually detrimental from their food https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pet_food#Impact and other services dedicated to them and their direct negative impact on the local wild life
mosquitoes: useful because their larva feed a large ecosystem, they also feed other insects, they also pollinate
Too simplistic views don't work in ecology. I'm pleased to inform you that yes, there are many species of wasps, big and small, and for sure, wasps (and flies, and mosquitoes) are good pollinators. Sometimes even the only pollinators.
... but their role as predators of caterpillars is more interesting for us
It's a bit like sharks, or wolves. If you are more experienced on this, on the complexity of ecosystems, you will start to figure the direct loss of production they can cause is relatively small and very well compensated by the role their indirect role in the ecosystem, less wasps could mean more caterpillars or other parasites (bad for farmer and beekeeper since bees will have less plants to forage). Bees know since a long time how to protect themselves. There's a reason scientist explain how sharks, wolves, wasps are highly beneficial. I think fortunately there's a growing awareness about this, more and more farmers understand these things as the condition for farming, pollution, drought, climate changes make things way harder for conventional agriculture methods
> If you are more experienced on this, on the complexity of ecosystems, you will start to figure the direct loss of production they can cause is relatively small and very well compensated by the role their indirect role in the ecosystem
Steady on there with the arrogance mate. At no point did I say all wasps should die or that their environmental impact was precisely zero.
No wasp at all should be eliminated, and their environmental impact is of course beneficial like basically all wild life (compared to the detrimental impact of a human, a pet), even the one you call "pest" for just turning around humans and killing a super small percentage of bees, let's stop living on opinions, best
There is no such thing as objective good. Good is relative to the individual making the judgement.
Dogs and trees make us happy. It’s amazing to go for a walk in the forest and breathe the fresh air. The smells of the forest are very pleasant and calming. Unfortunately, forests also tend to have mosquitoes everywhere due to the way shade preserves pools of standing water. Forests would be much more enjoyable to walk through without mosquitoes biting us all the time.
It’s as simple as that, really. We’re allowed to be biased. All other animals are biased. Foxes will kill every single chicken in a henhouse. The difference with us humans is that we can plan for the future in a sophisticated way. That’s why we build the henhouse rather than kill all the chickens immediately.
The rest of the job is just ecological study. If we can determine that the eradication of mosquitoes won’t cause the food chain to collapse and lead to widespread unintended problems, why not do it?
What is good from an ecological perspective? It’s what we humans prefer. Not just in the immediate term but in the long term. We know we like idyllic forests and meadows full of butterflies and reefs teaming with colourful fish. We don’t much like swamps teaming with mosquitoes and other biting insects but we recognize their value as habits for things we do like, mainly waterfowl. So if we can determine whether it’s safe to get rid of mosquitoes without disrupting the other things we do like, why not? After all, we created seedless bananas, grapes, and watermelons.
Does it matter if they serve some role in ecology? We have extinct so many species for no good reason at all, might as well add one more to the list when done for some beneficial purpose.
Yes, it matter. Would we remove the brake pedal of a car while driving? This is the same idea.
We are talking about removing the main wire of entire ecosystems without a clue of the real outcome. Could have some benefits? yes, it could, but the nice extra space for the feet wouldn't worth the danger. An unfixable waterfall of problems and many local economical collapses would be guaranteed.
Why? An organism that causes millions of human deaths needs to be wiped out. This is an evolutionary imperative. If a species (humans) get out-competed to death at large scale it will go extinct.
Disease is a form of population control in a survival of the fittest sort of way. They're probably much more useful than we'd like to think in the long run. Scarily, we're replacing all those mechanisms with us..
Yeah I sometimes worry that we will be creating a much more fragile human race because of modern tech. Will C-section over thousands of years cause us to be unable to procreate naturally. Many genetic abnormalities that used to mean you die now easily allow you to reach the age you can have children, keeping those genes in the gene pool. It's kind of scary.
And I say that as someone that would have died the first day on this earth without modern medicine.
On the other hand there is a good chance we master genetic modification to such a level we could just manually fix our genes.
The question was "is there anything good about mosquitos?" and your response is "control ... human population". Which I hope you know happens through pain and suffering of the affected individual and those around them. This doesn't seem like an acceptable price to pay, even if you think decreasing the population is a good thing.
think of bats. people generally don't give a crap about bats. Most of the ways we are able to justify their conservation efforts to the masses is that they "eat their weight in mosquitos.
a Lot of animals would lose momentum for conservation if we didn't have a united enemy.
you see what happens is without the skeeters, you dont have any food for the frogs, and without the frogs you lose the birds, and no birds means no cats and no cats means no pets and no pets means human suffering. or is there something else?
I think that mosquitoes should not be eliminated, whether they bite humans or not. The other kind of animals (including human) can live. You (and other living thing in this world) can (and should) defend yourself but that is not the right to destroy everything.
What is good of human? To be bitten by mosquito. What is good of mosquito? To be bitten by fish (according to another comment below). What is good of fish? To be bitten by human. (Of course, this is overly the simplification, but I hope to explain the point that I am trying to make.)
Absolute nihilism of all living things probably isn’t as obvious a philosophy as your comment makes it seem.
If nothing in life is valuable, including life itself, what gives? Do you still value less suffering over more suffering? Am I misunderstanding your perspective?
> Absolute nihilism of all living things probably isn’t as obvious a philosophy as your comment makes it seem.
I do not quite understand your comment, but Wikipedia says: "Nihilism [...] is a philosophy, or family of views within philosophy, that rejects generally accepted or fundamental aspects of human existence, such as objective truth, knowledge, morality, values, or meaning. Different nihilist positions hold variously that human values are baseless, that life is meaningless, that knowledge is impossible, or that some set of entities do not exist or are meaningless or pointless."
I do not seem to be of this view. I do not reject objective truth, etc, but I am of the opinion that the Absolute is inexpressible. (Therefore, effectively anything you will communicate (including these comments that I am writing) will be a simplification; if it was Absolutely everything, then you would not write nor even know all of it.)
Life is not meaningless, and truth, knowledge, morality, etc, is not meaningless, but its meaning/existence is related to everything else meaning/existence, or else it is nothing at all.
Within certain systems, you will have certain consequences of them, which are meaningful within them, by their relations (which are inevitable, and cannot be avoided), and in a larger system comprising them, or a smaller one, will be likewise correspondent.
(For example, any statement valid in intuitionistic logic is also valid in classical logic, although really since they are two different things, you must define how to convert them (which, in this case, you can merely use the same symbols and it will work, but that is because it is the convention to use the same ones and it will work, because they correspond to each other in such a way, that it will work). If you add/multiply natural numbers, the same corresponding result is as though you are adding/multiplying integers, reals, or finite discrete categories.)
(Other example is computer programs, too; they are also relation by the other programs in the computer and by the hardware I/O and software I/O, too. Without I/O (or if the program is not executed, or at least the source code read by someone who has printed it out), then the I/O of the program on the computer is not meaningful in relation to the umbworld, even though the program may be meaningful in relation to itself.)
(And, likewise, also living things; which also consists of biology which consists of chemistry which consists of physics which consists of mathematics, too.)
(And, yet, these things (numbers, living things, biology, chemistry, etc) are not even real "things" but only one way to define them in relation to the other things; it is the relations between things which are more "real" than the things themself, which are merely one way to define them. For example, a ball on a table is a ball but it is also many atoms. If you break the ball with a hammer then the atoms are not broken even though the ball is broken.)
> If nothing in life is valuable, including life itself, what gives?
Life is valuable. Things (whether this "things" is the world, or the life or some parts of the life, or numbers (or other mathematical objects), or even if it is the parts of the laws of physics) do not work in isolation, though. A life, whether they are human or fish or insects or trees (etc), is not a bad and a worthless thing, even though they affect each other.
Something might be good for one thing and bad for another thing (however you consider a "thing", whether you ignore the passage of time (or, alternatively, spacetime) or not), but it is to be avoided if it is bad in general.
Any life will have both help and harm (and, both at the same time, since it is not as simple as it seems); that is life. If any animal will eat a animal/plant that will harm that animal/plant, or if you defend yourself then this might harm whoever you defend yourself against, or sometimes the harm is caused by accident (in which case, hopefully is possibility to learn), but that means that creature is harmed (or that you are harmed). Each one, each part, is inevitably harm/help.
(If they are not affecting each other like that then nothing is ever worth anything at all. But, everythings is affecting each other in this universe, so it is worth everything, after all. This is true in biology as well as in mathematics (including platonic mathematics), physics, theology, etc. If a mathematical object somehow has no properties, theorems, relation to other mathematical objects, addition/multiplication with other numbers, etc, then it would be bad and worthless, but of course mathematical objects do have properties, theorems, etc.)
Anyone should try to avoid harm (although you (and the others animals) must eat/defense), and you should avoid to harm the world/life/environment; it should not be only beneficial to humans, or only beneficial to you, but it should be non-harmful to the world (including humans, trees, mosquitoes, and other animals/plants), to the degree that it can be achieved. (Likewise, in addition to not beinly only beneficial to humans, it also should not be only harmful to humans, either. If you say that human is good and others is bad, then that is no good, but other way around is also no good, either.)
You may try to defend yourself if a mosquito try to bite you, if you want to do; but you should not try to eliminate mosquitoes; they are right to live in this world too, as are humans, trees, etc.
> Do you still value less suffering over more suffering?
Yes, but you cannot take "less suffering" and "more suffering" in isolation, nor should it be limited to humans, or to animals that experience pain, or to animals in general, etc.
> Am I misunderstanding your perspective?
Probably, and probably it is because I am not communicating it clearly enough.
Please read my other comment (32535273) for some more things that I had written about the topic that I was replying to, though.
This might be a bit brutal, but to be honest: yeah. They kill a lot of humans. And humans very much need to be killed. There are way too many of us, and we're doing an awfully good job of wiping out Earth's biodiversity and long-term carrying capacity.
Yes, there are too many humans; the human population is too much. But, that does not mean that you have to kill everyone; that is no good. However, if you eliminate all of the mosquitoes, then that is also no good.
You must have right to defend yourself (from humans and from nonhumans), and mosquitoes and other animal also must have the right to defend themself (from humans and from nonhumans). However, this is not to be done by eliminating populations, or by starting by attacking all of the animals/plants.
Animal also might attack other animal/plants for food also will be needed though, including human and nonhuman. (And then, if there is an attack then also will be the defense.)
Humans should stop damaging the environment/world (including the parts of the environment/world which are harmful to humans). Many human hopefully should be having less children too, in order to reduce future population; that is better than committing suicide or by having a war. (While, some other animal (and possibly some plants too, but not human (at this time)) are endangered species and might need to have more children.)
I've been playing with the idea of an indoor mosquito capture device, so this study is interesting to me on a number of levels. (In case you're wondering why this would be any more difficult than outdoor capture: almost all of these devices burn propane or similar to generate the CO2, making them dangerous for indoor use.)
Most mosquito capture devices are just CO2 + heat; some are CO2 + heat + odor. I haven't seen one so far that just combines heat + odor, although maybe there's something out there.
Different species of mosquito are attracted to different chemicals, which helps explain why some people get targeted a lot and others not so much. Here's a random fact I just learned from another of the linked studies: Ae. aegypti are attracted to ammonia. I guess the variability helps complicate making a general-purpose machine that will work anywhere.
Also, some species prefer humans over other animals... I think they can still get confused, though. For instance, when I'm hanging out with my black cat, the mosquitoes all gravitate to him. The study suggests that mosquito sensory cues diminish with distance (duh, I guess), but perhaps some cues become predominant as the mosquitoes get closer. I've wondered if wearing patches of black fur on my forearms might help attract them to a specific location; haven't found any product that does that, either.
One more random observation from the study: they're using a pretty neat little membrane feeder full of blood to test the mosquitoes. I'd heard of past studies where human lab assistants just stuck in an arm to be fed on. I guess it's lucky for the assistants that they've advanced past that, but I'd also read that they acclimate fairly quickly. I wonder: would anyone be up for intentionally exposing themselves like that? I've been getting bitten by the same species for a year and still have skin reactions; personally, I think if someone offered me a few days of suffering to gain a resistance, I'd go for it!
> almost all of these devices burn propane or similar to generate the CO2, making them dangerous for indoor use.
I'm not saying it's a good idea, but burning propane indoors is allowed for cooking and heating... although there's venting requirements and venting probably includes the CO2, so maybe not useful.
I use outdoor mosquito devices that have UV + a sticky tape with odor (supposedly, I don't smell it and can't confirm). I don't know how effective they are vs other things, but they do capture a lot of flying creatures anyway.
Oh, sure, you can easily build your own propane pilot light to release a bit of CO2 indoors and it'll very likely be perfectly safe. But I don't think you could sell it to other people.
Most of those "mosquito" capture devices that use UV are very effective at killing everything else except for mosquitoes. Including a lot of stuff that probably shouldn't be killed.
If I am on table with 10 people and there are 2 mosquitoes, both of them will come and try repeatedly bite me. They will not go near the other 9 humans whatsoever (sniff them out).
I know mosquitoes are not supposed to be attracted to light. But I've had some cases where I left the window open at night with the lights on and my bedroom was swarming with them. Whereas with the lights off there are a few but not infested like that.
So in my own experience light does seem to be a factor somehow
In summer I live with minimal light, yes. I live in Spain so I need windows open and I don't have AC.
But there's a lot of street light as I live in a big city, so I can do with that (it's fine as long as it's brighter outside). I also have some xiaomi battery-powered motion-activated night lights to move around. My screens and TV are adjusted to low brightness and dark mode through automation. It works out ok for me.
I can basically do my normal activities with some exceptions. For example my Oculus quest tracking doesn't work. But I don't want to wear that in the summer heat anyway.
I don't think it's heat as I only have LED lights. Also, mosquitoes are far from the only troublesome bugs here. But keeping the lights off really seems to help for them too.
Over time, you can develop a tolerance to the bites. I definitely had this happen while living in SE Asia for 4 years... when I first moved to Vietnam, I had bites all over, after a while, I stopped reacting to the bites almost entirely.
I also think it's both. I find that when I'm taking oral antihistamines, the reactions are much smaller (no surprise). But I realized that Cetirizine (Zyrtec) was having a negative effect on my sleep so I need to find something else.
Interesting. I have bad hayfever and I always sleep worse in the season. I always thought the blocked nose makes my apnea worse but perhaps it's not just that. Good to know, I'll look into it
Agreed, it’s both. They don’t really care for me if others are around. I’ve never had a visible reaction from a mosquito bite. I live in The South and they are around during the warmer months.
My friend and his dad are completely ignored by mosquitoes. There can be hundreds of them and zero interest from the mosquitoes. Meanwhile, everyone else is getting ravaged.
There are lots of signals and so far nobody has found a reliable way to create something more attractive than a human.
There are traps that attract with co2 and smells and heat. They do attract but they don’t always win the taste test of which is more attractive vs a person.
Speaking about mosquitoes I’ve noticed something interesting. Where I live it was impossible during summer time to stay outdoors especially in the afternoon because you’d get bitten in no time. I had like two bites daily for months. Then a couple of years ago they completely disappeared. Incidentally, a large parking was created on the next block that uses led lights around the parking which stay on all night long and are quite bright. Could it be possible that the bright lights turned them away? I can’t find any other correlation to their disappearance. I now get like five bites the entire summer.
