Comment by JumpCrisscross 15 hours ago
You’re conflating eradicating disease-causing mosquitoes with eradicating all mosquitoes. To the extent that overinclusion occurs, it’s with traditional chemical pesticides. Not these novel methods.
No known species goes extinct if we eradicate disease-causing mosquitoes in the Americas. No known ecosystem collapses. Which is unsurprising, again, given they weren’t here until a few hundred years ago.
> The paper does not focus on disease-causing mosquitoes in the Americas
The paper looks for the effects of eradicating all mosquitoes and fails to find evidence it would be ecologically catastrophic. That isn’t an argument for doing it. (Nor, as you say, evidence of its absence.) But it helps constrain the blast radius of more-limited actions, such as wiping out only invasive, disease-spreading ones, all Anopheles varieties or even all human-biting varieties. (And somewhat suggests “frogs and swallows” going extinct as a result is hyperbole.)
I'm criticizing a paper called "A WORLD WITHOUT MOSQUITOES". I find it does a very poor job of explaining on what basis they claim that all the food web issues would go away simply by "would probably switch" citation needed.
The paper does not focus on disease-causing mosquitoes in the Americas. I'm more open to that case, especially since they are an invasive species here, but that paper simply isn't a good argument for that case.