Should we Eradicate Mosquitos from the Face of the Earth? What seems like an obvious answer to many might not be as easy as it sounds.

So, for some, a mosquito’s life is about surviving and making more mosquitoes and in the process, Humans suffer the most from diseases like malaria, dengue fever and most recently, zika. Mosquitoes have been spreading diseases for centuries, leading to the deaths of over half-million people each year. That’s huge! So many argue for and fall under the pro argument for eradicating mosquitoes as it would indefinitely save millions of Human lives each year.

However, looking at it from the con perspective, many in the animal kingdom eat mosquitoes as their food source. So, we do not know what would happen if we took away this food source from the birds, fish and insects. And the more we look into it, a lot of other animals, depend on mosquitoes as one of their main food sources. Take for instance the dragonfly (Earth’s only flying mammal!), they are ravenous eaters of adult mosquitoes. Would taking away that food source affect the way dragonflies go about their daily lives? We don’t know if they would adapt or be affected in some negative way.

So what it boils down to is that most advocates for the eradication of mosquitoes argue that our ecosystem won’t even notice if there were no more mosquitos. However, on the other side, most scientists aren’t so sure there wouldn’t be any aftereffect on the ecosystem. Because you know, science is about trial and error and it’s hard to test this theory in a closed environment, unless we had another Earth to test in in and the last time we checked, there’s only one Earth!