GMO

Are the anti-GMO crowd going to jump on this as well? http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/31/business/new-weapon-to-fight-zika-the-mosquito.html?_r=0

I would classify mosquitoes under the heading of “little things that irk us so.” I wonder what, if any, the environmental impact would be if we wiped them out completely.

Humans will sleep better, meaning they’ll wake up refreshed and not have to rush to work because they’re late. This will result in a drop in CO₂. Why yes a mosquito did keep me up until 2 am, why do you ask?

There is nothing that I am aware of that only eat these pesky things. I am also not aware of anything, apart from a few viruses that we can do without, that rely on them to survive. Like with polio, we can do without them.

Ahem, well… actually… at a previous place of employ there used to be frequent trips by all of us all around Africa. We soon came to use “mosquito” as an in-term to not only refer to the invertebrates that descend upon you when you exit any building and can usually kill you with some disease or another, but we’d also use it for the “professional company” that would descend upon you, cluster around, and follow you wherever possible/legal, once again infected with who knows what, making irritating noises, there to try to suck your wallet dry, and no matter how many you dispatch there always seem to be more.

Killing them all off may be a going a tad far. :slight_smile:

(Everything I say is maybe not PC, but it’s frikkin true)

My cat did the same to me. I recently moved house, so now she has to stay indoors for a week or three. Which means she yowls absolutely non-stop, from around 11 pm to around 3 pm, and her staff gets no sleep. But I wouldn’t suggest we wipe out cats. :slight_smile:

As far as I know, mosquitoes form part of the diet of bats. But they’re so small one has to wonder whether bats really need them.

In its larval form, the mosquito is an important staple of many small fishes (the unusual plural has the biological implication of denoting more than one species of fish). The mosquitofish is an excellent but disappointingly obvious example. The single obese goldfish that I’ve recovered from a virtually enclosed rainwater tank is a more surprising but less typical example.

Rigil

This just means we need to GM some syrup-sucking mosquitos.

EDIT: That have a natural fear of humans.