Mosquitoes are annoying little buggers. You’ve got a summer co-op term in Toronto, and you decide to take a walk through one of the parks – and BAM. Now you’ve got five mosquito bites on your arm that you’ll be scratching for days. You didn’t even see them coming. And don’t even think about camping – that full tube of AfterBite you’ll bring with you won’t even last until the second day. So wouldn’t it be great to get rid of the flying nuisances once and for all? Here are a couple of reasons why you can feel comfortable about imagining the eradication of all mosquitoes.
Because mosquitoes come into direct contact with the blood of so many different people, they are an excellent transmission vector for a variety of diseases, including yellow fever, dengue fever, West Nile fever, Zika fever, and malaria – to name a few. Most of these diseases have a low mortality rate but cause uncomfortable symptoms for those who are infected, such as fever, headache, vomiting, and rashes. The most concerning of these diseases is malaria, which does have a high mortality rate – the World Health Organization estimates that in 2015, more than 430,000 people died of malaria, with young children being the most susceptible. Because the type of mosquito that carries malaria –the genus Anopheles – thrives in sub-Saharan Africa, that is the region most affected by the disease, and for some countries, the deaths of so many people from this disease represent a significant stumbling block for economic growth. While it’s difficult to know exactly how much of an effect malaria has on economic growth, some estimates for the percentage of GDP lost as a direct result of malaria are as high as 1.3% – money which could be used to develop schools and infrastructure to further development. Removing mosquitoes – and therefore malaria – from the equation would accelerate development in the most affected countries, as well as alleviating a portion of the human tragedy in the area.
So eradicating mosquitoes will be good for humans – but won’t it have an effect on the ecology that they are a part of? Will getting rid of mosquitoes have some unforeseen consequence on us? We won’t know for sure until it happens, but some scientists are of the opinion that the ecological gaps caused by removing mosquitoes would be filled very quickly by other organisms. Most insectivores, such as birds and bats, have so many other food options that they wouldn’t mind the disappearance of mosquitoes. Furthermore, though mosquitoes are pollinators for a great number of plants, none of those plants are crops that humans depend on: Eradication of mosquitoes would not have direct consequences for human food production. Though the disappearance of mosquitoes could have an effect on the ecologies they are a part of, as far as we can see, removing them can only have beneficial direct consequences for humans.
From minor nuisances to major disease transmission vectors to ecological space fillers, mosquitoes don’t have very much going for them. Wouldn’t it be great to be rid of them once and for all? But while they’re still around, maybe it’s better to just stay inside.
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