Should We Eradicate Mosquitos?

[Fake Messiah]

"Mosquitoes are delectable things to eat and they're easy to catch," says aquatic entomologist Richard Merritt, at Michigan State University in East Lansing. In the absence of their larvae, hundreds of species of fish would have to change their diet to survive. "This may sound simple, but traits such as feeding behaviour are deeply imprinted, genetically, in those fish," says Harrison. The mosquitofish (Gambusia affinis), for example, is a specialized predator — so effective at killing mosquitoes that it is stocked in rice fields and swimming pools as pest control — that could go extinct. And the loss of these or other fish could have major effects up and down the food chain.

Many species of insect, spider, salamander, lizard and frog would also lose a primary food source. In one study published last month, researchers tracked insect-eating house martins at a park in Camargue, France, after the area was sprayed with a microbial mosquito-control agent. They found that the birds produced on average two chicks per nest after spraying, compared with three for birds at control sites.

Ecology: A world without mosquitoes

Yeah but that article seems to be more on the side of eradicating mosquitoes:

Yet in many cases, scientists acknowledge that the ecological scar left by a missing mosquito would heal quickly as the niche was filled by other organisms. Life would continue as before — or even better.

Views differ on what would happen if that biomass vanished. Bruce Harrison, an entomologist at the North Carolina Department of Environment and Natural Resources in Winston-Salem estimates that the number of migratory birds that nest in the tundra could drop by more than 50% without mosquitoes to eat. Other researchers disagree.
Cathy Curby, a wildlife biologist at the US Fish and Wildlife Service in Fairbanks, Alaska, says that Arctic mosquitoes don't show up in bird stomach samples in high numbers, and that midges are a more important source of food. "We (as humans) may overestimate the number of mosquitoes in the Arctic because they are selectively attracted to us," she says.

With many options on the menu, it seems that most insect-eaters would not go hungry in a mosquito-free world. There is not enough evidence of ecosystem disruption here to give the eradicators pause for thought.

And it ends with:

If we eradicated them tomorrow, the ecosystems where they are active will hiccup and then get on with life. Something better or worse would take over.


I say kill them all but preserve eggs and larva in labs just in case. There was an interesting episode on this on Radiolab of how they could be almost eradicated with GMO mosquitoes and they also noted that mosquitoes represent very small amount of energy value in food for animals
http://www.radiolab.org/story/kill-em-all/
They're only reason for not killing them is that "People could then live all over the world."