Joking aside, the consensus seems to be that the effect of removing disease-carrying mosquitoes (not all mosquitoes) from the environment is minor compared to how many lives it can save.
Is your level of knowledge on this just "there are other things called mosquitos ergo it's not a problem," or do you have deeper affirmative knowledge that the animals that eat these mosquitos also eat those other mosquitos, and that those other mosquitos can increase their population to replace the lost food source?
That's called risk.
Pointing out risk is not "fearmongering" lmao
Pointing out risk is a kind of fearmongering when it's technically real but too small to be worth worrying about. Asteroid impact is a real risk too.
In Europe though, where aedes aegypti didn't exist 20 years ago, it's probably the other way around: what did the introduction of this new species damage? (apart from making the summer unbearable outside if any of your neighbour isn't very strict with standing water elimination)
If it took a couple hundred years for this species to proliferate, it's absolutely plausible that eradicating it in a few years will have surprising second- and third-order effects.
Do you understand that time scales are important here?
There are also species that have invaded areas that are totally impossible for them to reach without seafaring or airfaring human civilizations to carry them.
All terms are made up. Some are useful and some are not. This one is useful.
Merely calling it invasive does not answer that question, ergo it is not a useful term in this conversation.
And yes, timescales do matter. A species can become critical to its new ("invaded") ecosystem within a few hundred years such that removing it within a few years will cause catastrophe.
I don't get the "but what if it's somewhat - not infinitely - bad" argument? The known good is so dramatically good that we'd need a shocking amount of unknown bad to have made it not worth it. But if I'm choosing between mosquitoes, and say... fish, frogs, and a variety of birds, yes, get rid of the mosquitoes.
We start spraying crops so we can end world hunger (or just make more money) and screwing around with other things and now we're killing bees and other things. This will ultimately come to haunt us.
The death of all bees would count as infinitely bad (in terms of crop pollination) and we're doing a very good job in making that happen.
A billion human lives, or some sad trout who have to eat fruit flies instead. For me, it’s an obvious choice.
I just can’t understand the level of smugness it must take to insist that we must force another billion people to die of horrible diseases like malaria, because you want the moral high ground. How do you even tell yourself that killing all those people is the moral high ground?
Yeah, it gets a bit silly real fast. I've never been accused for forcing a billion to die, so thanks for that.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_fatality_rate_in...
In fact, no, they did not say that. They said that the considered balance of the merits strongly favors eradicating the 2% of mosquito species that carry human diseases for someone who gives greater weight to the benefit of saving a billion human lives[0] than to the cost of some trout eating the thousands of other mosquito species instead.
[0] - 700 million contracted mosquito-borne illnesses each year worldwide. Death isn't the only consequence of significance.
If 20,000 humans weren't significantly harmed from disease because of this release, but 70,000 frogs faced starvation, which would you choose?
If we lose those frogs, it most likely would cause a cascade across other species. There are lots of things that eat frogs.
They're only applied to thing we don't want to do.
In reality, it's always true that we don't fully know, so applying the argument always means "let's not do this".
In the end, whose lives do you prioritize given the lack of information today, and the lives at risk today? Deciding to do nothing still costs lives, and potentially drives us further into the bad state area.