Every morning, Murphy opens a locked door at Walter Reed Army Research Institute in Maryland. There are many mosquitoes carrying malaria in it. She fed fish feed to millions of raccoons (mosquito larvae) and then let them bite those mice whose stomachs were unconscious. We need 24 mice every month. Murphy has been studying mosquitoes for 20 years, hoping to limit the speed at which mosquitoes spread viruses, and even hope that mosquitoes can completely disappear from the world.
Many people feel the same way. Every year, 247 million people are infected with malaria, resulting in nearly 1 10,000 deaths. Mosquito infections include yellow fever, dengue fever, Japanese encephalitis, Rift Valley fever, Qugong fever and West Nile virus. This disease causes huge medical and economic burden every day. At present, there are enough mosquitoes to suffocate Alaskan reindeer, and now they are almost everywhere in the northern hemisphere with high seasonality.
What if there are no mosquitoes in the world? Scientists tried to answer this question, and studied some surprising answers in mosquito biology and ecology. There are 3,500 known species of mosquitoes in the world, only a few of which bite humans. They are distributed all over the world and in various habitats, and are important members of many ecosystems.
Murphy said that mosquitoes have lived on the earth for more than 654.38 billion years and evolved with many species. Eliminating mosquitoes will cause predators to lose their prey and plants to lose pollinators. The world without mosquitoes is not just imagination. At present, countries have invested in various methods to eliminate mosquitoes with the most pathogens and the greatest harm in the world.
Scientists understand that even without mosquitoes, other species will be replaced, and the ecology will run as usual or even better. Giuliano, an insect ecologist at Illinois State University, said that mosquitoes are the main media, and there is no harm in eliminating mosquitoes; Ma Condes, a medical entomologist at the Federal University of santa catarina, Brazil, said that it would be safer if there were no mosquitoes in the world, and getting rid of malaria mosquitoes would be a great progress for mankind.
Killing mosquitoes by Arctic pests may have the greatest ecological impact on Arctic tundra. Many mosquitoes come from here. After laying eggs, insects will hatch after next year, and then they can grow into adults in just three to four weeks. In cold Russia, the number of mosquitoes is also very large.
Whether mosquitoes have disappeared is still inconclusive. Harrison, an entomologist with the North Carolina Department of Environment and Natural Resources, estimates that if there were no mosquitoes, the number of migratory birds nesting in the tundra would be reduced by half.
Other researchers disagreed with Debbie, a wildlife biologist in Alaska, USA. She said that when sampling birds' stomachs, there were not many mosquitoes in the polar circle, but insects were eaten more frequently. "Because it is easy for humans to notice mosquitoes. Let's overestimate the number of mosquitoes in the Arctic. "
Mosquitoes in the reindeer herd suck 300 ml of blood from each reindeer every day. It is thought that reindeer choose the wind route to avoid mosquitoes. A slight change in the migration direction of reindeer will have a great impact on the polar regions. Many reindeer trample on lichens, lick lichens, transport nutrients, become prey of wolves, and change the ecology. In this way, there will be no mosquitoes. It did affect the North Pole, but what about the rest of the earth?
Mosquitoes used as food Maylett, a water entomologist at Michigan state university, said that mosquitoes are easy to find and catch. If there are no flaws, hundreds of fish will have to change their eating habits in order to survive.
This sounds simple, but the predation habits of fish are usually quite fixed. For example, pot-bellied fish are good at eating mosquitoes hidden in rice fields and swimming pools. As mosquitoes disappear, they may disappear, and they will attack the whole food chain.
Many spiders, crickets, geckos and frogs have also lost their important food sources. The researchers tracked the hairy-footed swallows in French parks by spraying microbial mosquito repellent, and found that compared with the control group, there were an average of three young swallows in each nest, while there were only two young swallows in local nests.
After mosquitoes disappear, most birds that eat mosquitoes may turn to other insects. Other insect foods may be less affected. For example, less than 2% of most bat moths and mosquitoes are in the stomach pouch.
If there are many food sources, most animals that feed on insects will not starve to death because mosquitoes disappear. So far, the evidence is not enough to stop humans from killing mosquitoes.
There are a lot of scorpions in the global aquatic ecosystem to serve you. They can be seen in ponds, tree holes and old tires, sometimes in large numbers, which will produce a lot of bubbles on the water when twisted. They feed on rotten leaves, organic gravel and microorganisms. The question is whether other creatures can take their place without mosquitoes. Juliano pointed out that many creatures can deal with debris, and mosquitoes are not the only one or the most important. Just like pulling out a rivet on the wing, the plane will not stop flying.
The influence of mosquitoes depends on the size of the water. Swallowtail is an extremely important member of pitcher plants on the east coast of North America. Usually only mosquitoes, midges, rotifers, bacteria and single-celled animals live here. After other insects drown in the water, moths will eat the dead bodies, and swallowtail butterflies will live on the remaining waste to make nitrogen and other nutrients for pitcher plants. In this case, it will be eliminated.
Eddie Cotter, an ecologist at Cargary University in Canada, published a paper in 1974, analyzing the predation structure of Nepenthes. He thinks that if there are cockroaches, the diversity of single-celled animals will increase. He believes that cockroaches can maintain the balance of various single-celled animals, but the impact on Nepenthes is not clear.
Some people may think that mosquitoes can provide "ecological services" so that human beings can benefit from nature. Feng, an evolutionary ecologist at Rutgers University in the United States, pointed out that if humans are bitten or infected by midges, they will certainly want to get rid of them quickly, but because midges are pollinators of tropical crops such as cocoa, eliminating them will lead to no chocolate in the world.
If mosquitoes are lost, thousands of plants will also lose pollinators, and adult mosquitoes will feed on nectar (only certain kinds of female mosquitoes can get the protein needed for laying eggs). However, mcallister said that the pollination function of mosquitoes is not so important to the crops on which human beings depend. "If the existence of mosquitoes is beneficial, human beings have long discovered ways to make good use of them, but we only hope that mosquitoes can stay as far away as possible."
From this point of view, mosquitoes generally have only one function beyond other creatures, that is, sucking blood from one person and then injecting it into another person to form the best way of microbial infection.
Steeman pointed out that the ecological consequence of eliminating harmful mosquitoes is an increase in population, so many lives are saved and more people will not suffer from diseases. According to the World Health Organization, if sub-Saharan African countries get rid of the burden of malaria, their GDP will increase by 1.3%, thus accelerating social development. WHO malaria experts say that the pressure on the medical system and scientific research institutions will be reduced, public health funds can be diverted to other purposes, and the absence of students will be improved.
Ronnie Bo, a medical entomologist in Florida, said that killing mosquitoes will temporarily alleviate human suffering, but his research shows that after killing one vector, another vector will soon replace it. After catching the female mosquitoes suffering from yellow fever in the local area, the research team found that the vector became a white-spotted mosquito with many diseases, which proved that insects would replace each other.
Because mosquito-borne diseases have huge humanitarian and economic consequences, most scientists support improving people's health, even if the population will increase. Even though killing mosquitoes may have side effects, or emphasizing that every living thing in nature has its necessary role, it is difficult to convince the public. Moreover, it is difficult to kill mosquitoes, not because humans don't want to kill mosquitoes, but because there are limited methods to kill mosquitoes.
Today, humans are constantly making beneficial species such as tuna and coral endangered, but they cannot threaten the survival of mosquitoes. American entomologist Kelon said that mosquitoes didn't play any important role in the environment. If mosquitoes die tomorrow, the ecological environment will continue to evolve and other creatures will replace mosquitoes. Of course, it is not known whether it is good or bad.