Here's What Life Could Look Like If We Destroyed Mosquitos Forever

If there's one life form on Earth that almost everyone could agree needs obliterating, it's mosquitos. Even a sensitive person who gently carries insects to the window or the door to let them out of the house might unleash unrestrained fury on a mosquito if it lands on the skin. Smack, blam, dead, hooray. At minimum, everybody would be a lot less itchy and a lot happier if this scourge against sanctity didn't exist, right? This is especially true because for many people across the world, mosquitos are far worse than a mere nuisance. Malaria, Dengue, Yellow fever, the Zika virus, Chikungunya, various forms of encephalitis: mosquitos carry a host of horrific diseases.

And yet, because all facets of our global biosphere exist for a purpose, what would happen if we went all genocide on these horrible little critters? Mosquitos made the evolutionary cut at least 200 million years ago and are pollinators, like bees. Blood is actually their secondary food source, and only for females when they lay eggs. Some animals like bats, birds, and frogs eat mosquitos but don't rely on them solely for sustenance. So, would there be any terrible ecological fallout if all mosquitos everywhere died all at once? Truthfully, not too much. But given that there are 3,500 species of mosquito in the world, and an estimated 110 trillion of them alive – yes, trillion — this might not be such an easy task. But before thinking of "Can we do it?," we should answer, "Should we do it?"

If we ever really intended to eradicate mosquitoes, we'd have to understand and intercept the mosquito life cycle. That life cycle lasts from as little as four days up to a month, but that's plenty of time for mosquitos to breed and each female to lay up to 250 eggs at a time. Eggs can hatch into larvae within 24 to 48 hours, and those larvae pupate into adults that fly around, breed, and repeat the same cycle. The whole thing is dependent on one, single, critical type of habitat: standing water and related dank, unclean surfaces like gutters, air conditioner drip trays, tires hanging around the yard, rotting tree stumps, etc.

Mosquitos, in other words, live life in two phases: waterbound and airborne. The airborne, adult variety is the kind that everyone knows and hates — at least for mosquito females. Females lay eggs in locations that provide nutrients to their young, but they still need supplemental nutrition in the form of blood to produce eggs. Any old blood will do, even reptilian, but we humans are certainly big, vulnerable, relatively slow creatures without a lot of fur shielding our vulnerable skin from punctures. And while mosquitos aren't the most hardy of bugs and die pretty easily, they aren't always the easiest to swat, smack, crush, etc. — as we all know. They land on the skin, inject their proboscis — a built-in straw, basically — and their saliva passes into the skin as they suck up blood. Bam: instant nemesis.

And now we come to the big question that's been looming over this entire article: If we could eradicate mosquitos from existence — pluck them off the evolutionary map and flick them into oblivion — should we do it? If we truly want to behave in an ethical way towards all forms of lives, even the unpleasant ones, then it's important to remember that we're essentially talking about what biologist Olivia Judson described in The New York Times as a "specicide." Put differently: Would we be having this discussion if mosquitoes were cute and cuddly mammals?

For those for whom mosquitos are a real, existential threat the solution is likely obvious: kill them all. If not, reduce their numbers dramatically, as happened when sterile males released into the environment in the disease-vulnerable Cayman Islands reduced the mosquito population by 96%. After all, few species are so ecologically critical that their destruction would signal an unrecoverable loss to the environment. Or as biologist Olivia Judson says, "We're not left with a wasteland every time a species vanishes."

On the other hand, we've got all the familiar arguments about food webs, the interconnectedness of each species to each other, unforeseen and unplanned consequences if we tamper with nature, etc. But as the European Commission points out, it's not so much macro-level biomes we'd have to worry about when it comes to the eradication of mosquitos, but microbiomes, e.g., the interaction between mosquito larvae and single-celled organisms in mosquito breeding sites. It's still possible that mosquitos perform some role that we don't know about.