The Mosquito

[Thuy Vuong]

With this huge hiatus being taken down, I ask another question. Here
it is about the humble but annoying mosquito.

"In my opinion, every animal has a purpose in the ecosystem and
life...except the mosquito. It spreads disease and only feeds off the
blood of other animals. It won't affect the diet of some animals since
the mosquito is rarely the main food of any animal. Are there reasons
to keep the animal in the ecosystem or reasons to obliterate it?
Discuss!"

Once again, off the top of my head.

Cheers,
Thuy

[David Reich]

Well, how would we go about obliterating the mosquito?    There really arn't any good ways to go about it.  Any sort of toxin or poison, widely released, would certainly harm the environment in other ways, too.  And be logistically impossible.    It's much more economically feasible to simply provide everyone with nets, which can be produced very cheaply.  

(btw, are you quoting someone there?  It's in quote marks.  If so, "cite!")

[Quoc-Thuy Vuong]

No quotations, I just doing that to isolate and make the question more noticeable since there were no bold or italics to use. For the mosquitos, just hypothetically obliterate them. Like they would suddenly go "poof" and disappear off the face of the Earth. No harm to the environment whatsoever except that mosquitoes don't exist. I'm asking whether it would benefit or hinder the world.

cheers,
Thuy

[Quoc-Thuy Vuong]

By no quotations, I mean no quoting from other people but myself and there should be a "was" between the first I and just.

aru

[Mvpeh]

Bats can eat as much at 12,000 mosquito's a night. A lot of birds eat half this, too.


--
-Marton

[Quoc-Thuy Vuong]

Yet, bats also eat fruits and other insects. Birds also don't rely on mosquitoes on their main diet. If you guys can show me an article where mosquitoes are an animals main diet or it benefits the ecosystem, I'll consider it an integral animal. If not, I'll continue to despise it.

Thuy-aru

[Mvpeh]

Copy and pasted from an article about bats researched by a famous Scottish scientist:

Bats are Important in Many Ways:

• Controlling the insect population. A single little brown bat can catch up to 600 mosquitoes in an hour, and some bats can even catch up to 2,000 mosquito-sized insects in an hour.

--
-Marton

[Mvpeh]

Bats are Important in Many Ways:

• Controlling the insect population. A single little brown bat can catch up to 600 mosquitoes in an hour, and some bats can even catch up to 2,000 mosquito-sized insects in an hour.

This is from the Brown University's website.



--
-Marton

[Quoc-Thuy Vuong]

Interesting article excerpt. Thanks for your contribution to the conversation! Now notice that your excerpt says "some bats can even catch up to 2,000 mosquito-sized insects in an hour" not actual mosquitoes.

Now I found an article about the Big Brown Bat, or the Eptesicus fuscus. Here's the part on the diet.

Food: Their food is entirely insects, which they capture in flight. Fecal pellets of these bats have shown that they feed on beetles, wasps, and their allies, ants, stone flies, plant hoppers and leafhoppers, true bugs, and cockroaches. Peculiarly enough, it rarely eats flies or moths. They are seldom found in their digestive system.
http://www.handsontheland.org/classroom/04/bat.html

I don't see mosquitoes, though.

Here's another article about general bats.

Bat Food: A bat's diet depends on its location and its adaptations.

• About 70% of the world's bats eat only insects, and some of these bats can catch up to 2000 insects a night! These bats use echolocation to find their prey.
• Other bats eat mainly fruit, and these bats live in tropical regions around the globe. Fruit-eating bats generally seek out dinner using their eyes and their keen sense of smell.
• A desert bat uses its long nose and tongue to take nectar from flowers.
• Carnivorous bats, which eat small vertebrates including frogs, fish, rodents or birds, have especially sharp claws and teeth to help them catch and eat their food.
• Of the almost 1,000 species of bats, only 3 are vampire bats, and they live exclusively in South America. Contrary to popular belief, these bats do not suck blood, but rather lap it up similar to how a dog drinks water. Vampire bats have a number of specialized features that aid them in their diet: their two sharp front teeth are used to prick a sleeping animal; an anticoagulant in their saliva stops the blood from clotting, allowing the bat to lap up the 2 tablespoons of blood it needs. Despite their bad reputation, vampire bats are actually gentle creatures! The main threat that these bats pose to society is the spread of disease by feeding on cattle.

This was from the same site that you found. In the bat food part, there wasn't any mention on mosquitoes. The part you took from was where it controls the insect population. If mosquitoes don't exist, on the otherhand, the bat population won't be affected very much.

Cheers,
Thuy

[David Reich]

I don't think we can deny, though, that removing all the mosquitoes would cause some disruption to the bats, if not to the point of extinction or anything like that.  The problem here though - well, true to philosophical debate form, it can best be expressed by a series of questions.  Try to answer quick enough to keep this flowing,

Why would it be a good idea to remove all mosquitoes?

[Quoc-Thuy Vuong]

Well, the simple answer to the question is that mosquitoes are annoying. Their bite actually contains their urine so the bite irritates.

The simple-minded answer is that mosquitoes don't do anything except steal blood from other organisms.

The humanistic answer is that mosquitoes spread disease. Remember the West-Nile virus? It scared and killed a lot of the US. Spread by mosquitoes from Africa (I think).

That's all I can come up with off the top of my head.

Cheers,
Thuy

[David Reich]

So the life of some humans is more important than the life of all the mosquitoes, when the two are directly weighed, with no third parties?

[Quoc-Thuy Vuong]

Well, not only the life of all the mosquitoes, I'm considering more of how the mosquitoes don't help the world except burden it. It's only my opinion. I say yes.

Cheers,
Thuy

[David Reich]

Now, this isn't true, but assume there was some species of bat that fed on a diet of entirely mosquitoes.  If all the mosquitoes were killed, this bat would certainly go extinct.  Aside from eating the mosquitoes, this bat contributed in no way to the ecosystem - It ate nothing else, and nothing else ate or relied on it in any other way,  

So, would killing the mosquitoes, and thus the bats, still be worth it?

[Quoc-Thuy Vuong]

Which is why there are no bats that feed entirely on mosquitoes. If you find one species of bats that do, I'll reconsider.

Now personally, I would like more people than just David contributing to this conversation. WHERE ARE YOU, GUYS?

Cheers,
Thuy

[David Reich]

Reality is irrelevant, this is an argument by thought-experiment.  So what you're saying is that, having no effect on the external ecosystem, causing a species to go extinct is a bad thing?  

[Quoc-Thuy Vuong]

Sort of. Take an organism's body for example. If there is a part of the body that doesn't benefit it, it's taken out after some time. Like the whale's pelvis or the pinky toe. The entire world works that way. The way that if there isn't something that benefits it or keeps it in balance, it's taken out.

This isn't exactly reality or my ideals, mosquitoes shouldn't be taken out. It's just a topic for us to discuss to get us thinking. By us, I mean more than just David and I.

Cheers,
Thuy

[Mvpeh]

You may find this interesting.

http://www.texasmosquito.org/Bats.html

:D


--
-Marton

[Quoc-Thuy Vuong]

Yes, the article was interesting...now what? The article doesn't say anything about how the mosquito is beneficial but how beneficial the bat is. All of this talk makes me like bats more and mosquitoes even less.

:9

[Michael Oppenheimer]

Hey people! I just got back from the beach about a half hour ago, which is why I hadn't contributed until now.

I agree that there probably aren't any animals that feed solely on mosquitoes, but it will affect the diets of some animals so they have to switch to a different bug, and that will probably affect the diet of another animal etc. So even if it doesnt immediately affect the bats, it might affect some other animal immensely. And the effect will be enormous. Effectually.

[Paul Gully]

This entire conversation comes down to an argument over adverse
consequences. or more precisely, 'Unknown Consequences'. If every
single action was subject to the same scrutiny as this, nothing would
ever happen because we would be stuck up over 'what bad things may
happen because of this'- its a problem with logical arguments in the
real world, at least on things of this scale.

as for the original question- come up with a way to obliterate the
mosquito, and analyse the method the same way you are analyzing the
objective. are there any obvious problems with the method?