Why can't mosquitos be eliminated from the earth?

Question

Plz dont say mosquitoes are required to be there as a part of food chain. Think about million human beings killed.

Answer 1

Because it will be very hard to get the single last pair of them.
Insects like mosquitoes can multiply pretty rapidly. If you kill most but not all of them off, you basically make space for the progeny of the ones which survived.
If you use chemicals to kill the mosquitoes off, all the mosquitoes which happen to have a higher resistance to your chemical will survive, thus giving rise to a new generation of mosquitoes which all have a higher resistance to your chemical, so in future it will be harder to kill them off with your chemical, you eventually will have to come up with another chemical. In addition depending on your chemical you may also kill useful insects or fish (which you would like to eat if you hadn't poisoned them along with your mosquitoes).
The problem with mosquitoes killing humans by transmitting diseases is more that in poor countries the appropriate medications are either not available or too expensive. In addition poor and hungry people have less resistance against diseases than healthy people. The real problem is poverty not the mosquitos.
In addition, if you would eradicate mosquitos, eventually another organism would come to take over their role in nature.

Answer 2

They are part of the food chain you can't deny that- millions of humans are killed, yes, but there are a billion more.
Mosquitos are a stable diet of some predatory moths, shrews, bats, birds, etc. If you take out the lowest level of the food chain, those animals go as well. Lets take something simple- you take away the insects, then all the insect eaters are out from no food. Then you take away the predators that ate the insect eaters, and so on and so forth.


Unless you mean eliminating all of them- litterally- which is impossible because you would need to put pesticide on every portion of the earth at the same time- and in doing so, you are polluting all of your water and air. Both for humans and other animals alike.

Answer 3

Indeed mosquitoes do provide food for other living things like fish, birds, and dragonflies. Sorry to say that based on your added comments, but blood sucking parasites like skeeters can play an important role in a healthy functioning ecosystem. But to answer your question, first mosquitoes like other insects (and parasites) produce a boat-load of offspring and when conditions are right they can have quite a population explosion. We cannot eliminate them because we couldn't swat everyone of them. Chemical control does not work because like us human that are quite variable in the way we look (and handle chemicals, viruses, and bacteria (that's physiological variation)), there are some individuals that will be more resistant to a pesticide. These individuals will reproduce and make more resistant blood-sucking skeeters. Result: population of mosquitoes has changed (that's evolution, cause by inadvertent artificial selection).

Answer 4

That would be a bad idea. Mosquitoes are a primary food supply for many species of bird, reptile, and mammal (bats). These are in turn are food for other animals and so on.

Answer 5

Every single living thing, from microscopic organisms to sperm whales has a purpose, even the lowly mosquito. It's basic biology.

Answer 6

They can be: we've successfully eliminated other species.

It would be very hard with mosquitos, though: they're *everywhere*. They're tiny, they breed in any little bit of still water, and feed off all sorts of animals.

Answer 7

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It is possible, but it would be very hard. They live almost everywhere, they're small, and there are a lot of them.

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