It’s unusual for a left-leaning paper to propose wiping out an entire species. Normally they’re proposing doing the exact opposite – reintroducing species that haven’t been seen there for hundreds, if not thousands, of years. But in a recent column in the Observer, Eva Wiseman decided that wiping out all mosquitoes is the best solution for humankind.
Very few people like mosquitoes, that’s true enough, and there are serious and sensible reasons behind that dislike. As well as their blood-sucking tendencies, they also transmit some of the deadliest diseases on this planet – most famously malaria, but also a whole host of others, including dengue fever and the one that’s making the headlines at the moment, the Zika virus.
But is simply killing them all – and thereby removing them from the ecosystem entirely – the answer? Humans have already wreaked havoc across the world by fiddling around with natural ecosystems – introducing animals here, eradicating them there – with a whole host of disastrous and unforeseen results.
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