Submitted by lughnasadh t3_yortnc in Futurology
Reply to comment by PersonOfInternets in English company Oxitec has released a simple, easy to distribute commercial product they say cuts Dengue Fever spreading mosquito populations by 96%. By just adding water, genetically modified mosquito eggs mature into males whose sperm cannot result in viable female larvae. by lughnasadh
I don't think so, actually.
The species that bother humans are very limited. Out of the 3000+ species of mosquito of which we are aware, less than 100 bother humans at all. And less than 10 cause the diseases that kill hundreds of thousands of humans every year.
Do you think ecologists are not involved in this research? The majority opinion of scientists is that is that it's acceptable. The eradication of say, the Aedes mosquito would eliminate Dengue Fever. Eradication of Anopheles would eliminate Malaria. The loss of these two species would not severely impact the ecosystem considering the fact that their ecological niche would be taken up by other mosquitos that do not bother humans, mosquitos that are already in the same ecosystem.
Malaria is caused by a parasite, there is no such thing as a vaccine. The anti-parasitical medication which kills the parasite has to be taken weekly. You cannot idealistically expect millions (almost a billion, actually) of poor people to buy this medication. Strategically eliminating specific mosquito species would save the lives of millions of people. Literally millions. These are real people, real lives, not some fucking statistic which you can blindly sacrifice in order to preserve a couple handfuls of mosquito species.
I'm not taking lives lightly. I think some here are taking the fragility and interconnectedness of ecosystems lightly. We can guess, but we can't know the ramifications of taking actions like this.
The certain deaths of millions of people take precedent over the possibility of unforeseen ecological impacts, especially if experts say those impacts are unlikely.
https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsif.2019.0270
As a matter of fact, the spread of the Aedes mosquito (responsible for most mosquito diseases but not malaria), originally localized to Egypt, is a result of human intervention. This species is inherently invasive, that is, it does not belong in most ecosystems.
The extinction of human-feeding mosquitos also heads off the possibility of a future global pandemic of zoonotic origin that jumps species to humanity due to mosquitos. And the pandemic is significantly more likely than severe ecological impact from their extinction. As a matter of fact, scientists have been warning about the dangers of a COVID-like pathogen being transmissible by mosquitos.
https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2021-06-25/column-california-mosquitoes
We cause the extinction of dozens of animal species (about 150) literally every day. This one just happens to be deliberate, because they're causing half- to three-quarters of a million human deaths every year. And because of climate change, one of those deaths might end up being you.
>We cause the extinction of dozens of animal species (about 150) literally every day
Precisely. Humanity is a disaster. I understand and appreciate your argument, and you may be right. But for me it is never okay to genocide a species. As far as I'm concerned it's nature trying to reclaim a bit of space for itself.
If it makes you feel better, the mosquito species in question will continue to exist in much lower numbers farther from human civilization. This kind of measure is self-limiting because the modified mosquitos (and their offspring) will eventually die out on their own, being sterile. Aedes populations in remote regions will survive. The hope is that with those lower numbers the diseases will die out since the mosquitos will be exposed to far fewer infected humans.
Yeah I get it. For me, the biosphere is always ranked above humanity in importance (since it is what we are and what we depend on). Ultimately I am more concerned about the precedent this would set. Earth is extremely overpopulated and we are bound to live in places that the earth would rather reclaim. Not trying to minimize the importance of human life, just saying human life isn't more important than earth life.
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