Why we don’t actually want a world without mosquitoes

I want you to close your eyes and imagine a perfect summer girls’ night out: It’s dusk and you assemble your crew and hit up the ultimate cookout. You avoid hanging out by the grill because you don’t want all that smoke in your face, but the food really starts calling your name. And it’s quite the spread! You gorge yourself on a delicious meal and then — even though you hate to dine and dash — you head out. You got what you needed and you’re off to the next spot.

That is the perfect Saturday night… for a mosquito.

These bloodthirsty insects are more than an annoyance that feasts on your ankles. Mosquitoes are the deadliest animal on the planet. They spread illnesses like malaria, which kills over 600,000 people a year.

The good news: Scientists are working on swatting our mosquito problem away for good. Google’s Debug program, for example, recently asked the Environmental Protection Agency for permission to release over 30 million sterile male mosquitoes in Florida and California, with the goal of shrinking the mosquito population by limiting reproduction.

It’s a great strategy to curb diseases spread by mosquitoes, such as Zika and dengue. But would it be possible to get rid of these annoying insects altogether? And if so, should we?

That’s a question Greg Kaebnick, a research scholar at the Hastings Center for Bioethics, tackled for the National Academies of Sciences. “We got together a group of environmental ethicists, conservation biologists, and ecologists to think about this question: Would it be okay ever to wipe out a species?” he told Vox. “We brought together folks like me [who are] predisposed to try to protect species. But we were persuaded that sometimes the case could be made.”

So, what factors should you account for when you think about whether a species should exist? We answer that and more, including what to do about the mosquito bites you do get, on the most recent episode of Explain It to Me, Vox’s weekly call-in podcast.

Below is an excerpt of my conversation with Kaebnick, edited for length and clarity. You can listen to the full episode, on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. If you’d like to submit a question, send an email to askvox@vox.com or call 1-800-618-8545.

I have to admit that I would not be terribly upset if mosquitoes were gone tomorrow. Are there people who think, why not just get rid of them all? What is stopping that idea from happening?

There’s nobody doing research on these technologies or looking at the diseases who’s saying let’s get rid of all mosquitoes. For one thing, getting rid of all of them would be phenomenally difficult. The real goal for the people who are doing this work is to address the underlying public health problem.

With malaria, the mosquito is a vector. It’s part of the lifecycle of plasmodium, which is this single-cell microbe that gets into your bloodstream and causes malaria, and you can get rid of malaria by getting rid of plasmodium. You don’t have to get rid of the mosquito.

The people who are working on getting rid of plasmodium are pretty careful to say “We’re not targeting the mosquito, but absolutely we’re getting rid of plasmodium.” I think intuitively, people have slightly different views about species at different levels. I haven’t seen anyone lament the possible loss of plasmodium.

How do we get rid of it? Can we just copy, paste, repeat and make it so malaria is not a thing anymore?

We hope so, but it was a huge undertaking getting rid of malaria in this country. There was a big endeavor funded by the Rockefeller Foundation to create a huge center in Atlanta. It was in the southern United States where malaria was really a problem. That whole organization created by Rockefeller later was given to the federal government and turned into the CDC.

The effort was pesticides to kill the mosquitoes. It was a habitat change. It was draining swamps, it was clinical care. In order for the plasmodium life cycle to continue, a person who is infected with plasmodium has to be bitten by a mosquito. But if you take a sick person and you put them in a bedroom with screens, that alone helps you get rid of plasmodium. It was a combination of a whole lot of things like this that allowed us to get rid of it.

Would it be okay just to eliminate certain species since there are some that don’t carry the disease?

That’s essentially where we came down in Anopheles gambiae [species complex]. We thought, this one is really pretty horrific. There are about 800 species of mosquito in Africa. You could get rid of Anopheles gambiae across sub-Saharan Africa, and chances are there would be little to no environmental impact from losing it.

Then there are other kinds of mosquitoes that have been spread around the world. They’re not native, and so you’re not necessarily changing a natural system if you get rid of them.

I noticed that you said “chances are” that it would probably be fine. How do we know for sure?

You don’t know for sure. Then the question is, “Well, do you need to know for sure? How do you feel about the level of uncertainty here?”

If you’re in a burning building and you need to jump to the ground, do you know for sure that you can get to the ground without killing yourself? You don’t necessarily, but if the building is on fire, you’ll go ahead and take the chance. Malaria is a little bit like that.

When you get bitten up in the summer, what do you think of it? Does doing this type of research change your relationship with all that buzzing in your ear?

A little bit, it does. I like to go up to the Adirondacks and go canoe camping up there, and if we go at the wrong time, there will probably be a few species of mosquitoes biting us and there could be several species of fly biting us and it can be really pretty tough to be up there. But I would not want to get rid of all of the species of mosquito and biting black fly up there. It’s part of the whole system and I want to leave it alone.

I think that the reluctance that we have to wipe out mosquitoes is representative of the value that we find in the natural world. This is why the Endangered Species Act is the landmark environmental policy accomplishment of the 20th century. Wild species are a marker of the value of the natural world, and it feels like a particularly awful thing to do to get rid of a species. And so the argument in favor of it, if you were ever to do it, would have to be really quite strong.