No Mosquitos, No Problem? It’s Not Quite That Simple
By James Gorman,
The New York Times
Elizabeth Willott is the kind of professor who gives the ivory tower a good
name. She is an entomologist and environmental ethicist at the University of
Arizona, and I called her to ask a simple question: What good are mosquitoes?
Dr. Willott seemed like a good person to call because she has spent some time
thinking about these issues. She has an article in the current issue of
Restoration Ecology titled “Restoring Nature, Without Mosquitoes?” In it she
notes that in planning wetland restoration, people sometimes fail to give enough
thought to one inevitable consequence–more mosquitoes. In the bad old days,
not all wetlands were drained to build hotels. Another motivation was the real
fear of death and disease, as spread by mosquitoes.
So, I asked, what about mosquitoes? Would everything really collapse if we got
rid of them? Well, she said, no. The web of life is not that fragile. “If you
take a snip, it won’t unravel.” In fact, she said, there is “quite a bit
of ecological research now showing that removal of a species doesn’t make a
huge difference.” If the species of mosquitoes that are intimately connected
with human beings were made to disappear, there might be some ecological
disturbance, but “you probably could remove them without catastrophe.”
Do they do anything of value, then? That depends on your point of view, she
said. The philosophical arguments about intrinsic value versus instrumental
value can get quite complicated. In essence they ask whether a mosquito, or a
tree, or anything, has a value in and of itself, apart from what human beings
think.
This is the sort of discussion that may be intriguing in an air-conditioned
classroom, but seems absolutely incomprehensible at dusk near a marsh. If there’s
a chance that our children might get encephalitis, then we’re ready to wipe
mosquitoes off the face of the earth.
One small step beyond this “me, me, me” approach is to think about the value
of any given organism to environmental balance. This is still not intrinsic
value, since environmental balance is useful to people, but it is a bit less
self-centered. Step outside the anthropocentric view of life and one possible
value of mosquitoes is population control. Mosquitoes have historically kept
human populations down worldwide, and still do in much of the third world. The
problem is that they do this by facilitating pestilence and death, so this is
not going to enhance their status, among human beings at least.
Mosquitoes may also keep some other animal populations down by spreading disease–something
we might be able to see the value of. And other creatures–some fish, frogs
birds and bats–eat them. It’s possible that if we were able to wipe out
mosquitoes, some other species might either suffer from lack of food, or explode
in numbers because the burden of disease was lifted.
Another value of mosquitoes, perverse to some, obvious to others, is that they
“keep out the riffraff,” meaning human beings. Concentrations of pests offer
protection to wilderness areas. The tsetse fly, which causes livestock disease
as well as human sleeping sickness, has kept humans away from some wildlife
refuges and has been called “Africa’s best conservationist.” Of course,
this view has been described by others as ecological imperialism.
In any case, the reality, said Dr. Willott, is that “we’re not going to get
rid of the mosquitoes.” It’s just impossible, particularly if we want to use
methods that don’t kill off everything else. DDT is very effective at mosquito
control, but it can be disastrous for birds of prey.
When I asked Dr. Willott if she thought it was immoral to try to make a species
go extinct, assuming you could do it without hurting other organisms, she
thought the question was significant enough to require a formal statement.
“Striving for the unachievable is not an appropriate use of resources,” she
said. “If one acknowledges that eradication is highly unlikely to work or
might have serious side effects, the moral thing to do would be to find another
way.”
In other words, don’t be stupid.
What she suggests is that we take the middle ground and try to kill some of the
mosquitoes some of the time.
I mentioned to her at the end of our conversation that although mosquitoes
were not that much fun to be around in reality, I shared her fascination
with them.
As a subject to talk and write about, they are irresistible.
Yes, she said, “and they end us the same.”