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If we could engineer and exterminate all ticks and mosquitos we'd all be so happy.
And dead cuz the food chain would collapse.
Had to ask ChatGPT what relies on ticks and mosquitoes to survive
Species that Rely on Ticks:
Borrelia burgdorferi: The bacterium that causes Lyme disease, which relies on Ixodes ticks (deer ticks) for transmission.
Rickettsia rickettsii: The causative agent of Rocky Mountain spotted fever, transmitted by various tick species.
Babesia: Various species of Babesia rely on ticks for transmission to vertebrate hosts, causing babesiosis.
Species that Rely on Mosquitoes:
Dengue virus: Relies on Aedes mosquitoes (especially Aedes aegypti and Aedes albopictus) for transmission.
Zika virus: Also transmitted primarily by Aedes mosquitoes.
West Nile virus: Transmitted by several species of Culex mosquitoes.
Malaria parasite(Plasmodium spp.): The Plasmodium parasites, such as Plasmodium falciparum, rely on Anopheles mosquitoes for part of their life cycle.
Wuchereria bancrofti: The causative agent of lymphatic filariasis, transmitted by Culex, Anopheles, and Aedes mosquitoes.
Brugia malayi: Another filarial nematode causing lymphatic filariasis, primarily transmitted by Mansonia and Anopheles mosquitoes.
Someone is asking the real questions. The AI answer may be garbage but appreciate the initiative.
In Australia, ticks are an important apex predator. They keep mammal populations in check so they don't eat all the food and starve.
Here in Virginia, right outside of DC, and the ticks just give everyone Lymes. They are absolutely fucking everywhere too and it gets worse each year.
They're meant to help keep the politician population in check.
Maybe their diet would shift but a lot of animals eat ticks. Frogs and toads, many smaller birds like warblers and probably house sparrows and robins, chickens love them, and of course opposums and mice.
Similar for mosquitos. I see the house sparrows around here catching mosquitos all the time. I'm pretty sure dragon flies feed heavily on them too.
Opossums eat more ticks around where I live than anything. I’m in Virginia so we have all the shitty deer ticks with Lymes. It’s a big problem.
I imagine anyone living where mosquitoes have malaria or any of the other crappy viruses wouldn’t mind them being extinct.
Fish are natural predators of mosquitos.
Ah yes, of all the species we've eradicated, the one that makes up the least biomass would surely be the proverbial straw that breaks the camel's back.
All I know is that projects like this rarely go as planned. I mean, just ask Australia, they've had a couple animal control schemes gone terribly wrong. The truth is that we don't always know every function of a particular animal within an ecosystem, and messing around with them could have difficult to predict consequences.
My republican friend would suggest that you should have trans folk read to them and then they’ll turn gay. No way to reproduce then.
Why would you be friends with such an individual
I’m in my early 40s and politics wasn’t a thing we really talked about much until Trump came around. Now it’s a shit show. I’ve even voted Republican several times before although not for a decade at this point now.
Sounds like they have some nasty views irrespective of politics. Treating gay and trans people like people has nothing to do with politics.
We're a similar age. I've let go of people who voiced these views a long time ago. It's not that our politics don't align, it's the fact that they're an ignorant, offensive piece of shit... And I'm not.
He actually doesn’t have any problem with gay people. I know this because my brother is gay.
His main schtick with trans people is that he thinks kids shouldn’t be allowed to undergo surgery since their minds aren’t fully developed.
He is a big Tim Pool fan and I have a feeling that a lot of his bullshit is just echoing the beanie man.
Haha you're not really selling me on him, but I'm not telling you who to be friends with. But you know, the company you keep..
Wait, you can keep companies?
steals Google
Once Trump is gone the spell will be lifted, maybe
A decade's worth of these views is enough to consider the person a prick. Being ok with one gay person's existence (standing ovation for that bare minimum) is not acceptance of gay people. That's pretty much 'i have black friends so I'm not racist '.
He’s also a bouncer at a gay club so I’m pretty sure he’s okay with gay people
I’m not really concerned how you feel about him based off of one or two comments I’ve made poking fun at him. I’ve known him for 25 years so I’m pretty sure I know who he is. Right now he’s a bit brainwashed by Tim Pool. If everyone just cut off their Republican friends then they would become even more insular and I’m not sure if that’s a good thing.
Mosquitos are pollinators.
Not every species are beneficial. There are only a handful that bite us and don't really contribute to the ecosystem. Those are the ones we need to get rid of.
I think you'd have to define beneficial..... Any species with sufficient biomass will become part of the surrounding ecology, with several other species adapting over time to predate upon that biomass.
Both tics and mosquitoes are huge sources of food for animals like birds, bats, fish, amphibians, and especially other insects. Completely destroying them would likely lead to an ecological disaster, just as it does when humans attempt to sanitize any aspect of nature.
The sanitizing process of urbanization is one of the largest reasons mosquito populations have exploded in North America in the last hundred years in the first place. Instead of mosquitoes laying eggs in ponds and waterways that are filled with frogs and fish that normally control their population. They are laying their eggs in urban environments that the animals who normally govern their population cannot thrive.
Idk man, I've lived in a tiny remote village of only a couple hundred people with no water, electricity, plumbing or roads and mosquitos would go insanely hard during the summer. It was the village my mother and grandmother grew up in and I had the privilege to experience it for a couple years. It sucked.
I've seen those nat geo docs in Africa as well of remote villages where they trap mosquitos yearly during the swarm and make parties out of them to eat.
Small sample size but I don't think urbanizing is helping them explode in numbers. It is killing their predators though, you're right but it's also killing them.
There have always been areas with large populations of mosquitoes, especially in warm wet climates around the equator. However in the last hundred years they have been utilizing urbanization to spread further north and south, mainly because cities lack biodiversity and have offer almost unlimited food Sources
Nobody wants to exterminate all mosquitoes. Just the ones that bite humans.
I don't think that specificality really affects the argument. Any effort to reduce a significant amount of biomass is going to have untold amounts of consequences on an ecological scale.
Whether that's beneficial or not depends on who you're talking about.
Relevant rabbit holes for the lazy:
We don't understand the intricacies of any ecosystem nearly enough to start engineering it. Pull one thread, and you might unravel the tapestry.
We wipe out thousands of species every year through pollution alone, what's one more to add to the pile?
- Ticks, mosquitoes, ... aren't just one species.
- The species that go extinct are mostly local ones that don't have large numbers to begin with. While one individual mosquito is insignificant to a ridiculous degree, mosquitoes as a whole, even just one species, play a much bigger role than the Northern Fuckwitted Summerbunny of East Whateverstan could ever do.
Not all mosquitoes bite humans. If you exterminated the biting ones, the non-biting ones would just fill that same ecological niche.
Mosquitoes are the only natural predators of humans. If you mess with the delicate ecosystem, humans will procreate uninhibited and exhaust their resources, leading to a far worse fate. It's kinder to just leave the mosquitoes be, and let nature run its course.
The males don't bite, but the females need that sweet protein from blood to grow the next generation. Exterminating all the females (the biting ones) would end the whole population.
The non-biting variety are called "blind mosquitoes" or "midges". Their females don't suck blood.
Not cosmopolitan mosquitoes