Point vs. Counterpoint

In the Defense of Mosquitoes

Mosquitoes have a bad, and admittedly, well-deserved reputation for being an annoying and troublesome pest. Their incessant droning as they fly past your ear is a hated sound, as it the unfelt bite that quickly evolves into an annoying itchy bump. Recent advances in science, and particularly in genetics, have raised the possibility of wiping the entire Culicidae family. Perhaps more importantly, this can now be done without poisons like DDT that have adverse effects on other animals and, critically, humans.

With the apparently impending demise of the mosquito upon us, it is time to decide if the mosquito really should go. While we can eradicate mosquitoes, we do not know for certain what effect eliminating mosquitoes would have on ecosystems. There is an intrinsic importance to biodiversity, and it may not be prudent to purposefully eliminate species when so many are already dying around us.

Eliminating the mosquito is not a clear and obvious decision: We do not know the full and complete effect that this will have on the environment. Mosquitoes are a part of a huge variety of ecosystems globally. It is impossible to predict how their elimination would affect each one. For instance, mosquito larvae often eat unicellular algae and are then eaten by fish. This is a critical part of the food chain, moving energy from the photosynthetic organisms to higher organisms. Perhaps there are other organisms that can take the place of mosquito larvae in some ecosystems. But this will still have knock-on effects, irrevocably changing ecosystems around the world.

Humans have a track record of negatively impacting environments that they do not understand, even when they do so with good environmental intentions. An example of this is Pinery Provincial park in Southern Ontario. This park is one of the only remaining stands of the ecosystem known as oak savanna. As the name suggests, the ecosystem looks like a savanna, with long grasses and sparse oak trees. But in the 1960s, park authorities saw the sparse trees as symptoms of an unhealthy forest and rectified the situation by planting millions of fast-growing pine trees. Today, extensive restoration activity is still ongoing to restore the natural sparse savanna. Similarly, the apparently obvious step of killing mosquitoes may affect ecosystems very negatively and in ways we could never foretell.

The final reason why the mosquito should not be genocided with impunity is that biodiversity is intrinsically important to the world and civilization. So many modern medicines originate in plants and animals. All around us, animals and plants work to do our bidding: Plants provide us with food, insects and birds clean our sewage, and bacteria and fungi make a cornucopia of new chemicals like antibiotics for us to harvest and replicate. When we eliminate a species, we eliminate our own tools. There is already a potential mass-extinction event happening as a result of human activities; can we afford to handicap ourselves even further by purposefully eliminating species?

Mosquitoes are a pest, and mosquitoes do carry disease. But like all species, mosquitoes are a lot of things. They are a part of their ecosystem, and the effect of eliminating them is unknown. There could be negative consequences to doing so that we would have to deal with for decades to come. And as we eliminate species, we impair the diversity of the world in which we live, to our own detriment.

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