This is unfortunate news
 

Cornell Chronicle: Species extinction bad for our health - StumbleUpon

More PAthogens with less biodiversity

There's probably some fabricated counter-study by a hack lobbying group out there by now. :gmad: Don't worry people, species loss is actually good for your health...

If we could achieve some good with the bad, then might as well get rid of flies and mosquitoes in the process. I don't think there are any animals that I'd want gone aside from those.

IIRC, someone designed an anti-mosquito laser to stop malaria from spreading. :awesome:

I remember reading about this :( Our heavily diseased descendants will hopefully look back at us and seethe with rage. Everything has it's place, even flies and mosquitoes, they are somethings prey.

No, the mosquito thing was different.

Scientists somewhere genetically modified the species most likely to carry malaria so that they would survive better than the wild type, and also engineered in a gene that causes them to be less hospitable places for the malaria protozoans to hide.

This, IMO, was incredibly stupid for 2 reasons.

1) They did it to drive down the death rate from Malaria. This in itself is a noble cause, but malaria is one of the last potent checks to the human population, and since we don't seem to be anywhere near enforcing birthrate limitation laws, the population will skyrocket if it works, and then future humans will be cursing us anyway when billions of them die to some super-mutated flu virus instead of a few hundred thousand or so to a parasite that is easy to avoid.

2) Making a difference between the safety/hospitality of one mosquito to the others different is like asking for stronger Plasmodium parasites. One of the easiest ways to jump start natural selection is to make a habitat (the innards of a mosquito, in this case) more or less inhospitable to a certain species or to a certain strain of a species.


That may have seemed off topic, but it really wasn't. The only way to actually halt the loss of biodiversity and stop these things from happening is to stop messing with the ecosystem in general.

It's a tall order, but if we stopped all the things we were doing globally to the planet right now that were overly harmful, we would be just fine. Of course, that means to immediately stop having babies for one, which would never happen. :/

*shakes fist at the babies*

Really, what wouldn't be better with a lower population :P

Nothing... it would help with every single problem in the world :(

I heard about the GM mosquitos, and I mean it was someone else with the laser beam.

Just to put things in perspective, this is harder than going to Mars. :P Unless you want to conquer the world, we don't even have the infrastructure to even try anything major about slowing down population growth.

Pew pew laser cannon!

Useful animals and the non annoying variety are also be part of the food chain, so we don't really need to have the annoying ones around. Just have more of the useful ones like bees, butterflies, dragonflies, ladybugs and stuff.

My chances of finding a women.


...wait damnit, I just dissed myself.

But in my opinion, human interference with the environment, like using certain animals to control other animal populations, like that raiden is talking about, etc seem to be short sighted and usually don't end up going according to plan, simply because of how many factors there are to take account of.

You know your chances would be exactly the same :P unless of course you plan on meeting around 500 million or more females in your life :xD:

I think that'd be considered death by snu-snu :)

(Futurama joke)

If it lived here before us, it has a right to live, no matter how annoying it is. And, no matter how useless it seems, every organism in the world is important to another.

If you eradicated all the mosquitoes, bats would largely go extinct, as would craneflies and dragonflies, which prey on them as well.

Cool, I need to set up a spider lair and a dragonfly hive to make a biological countermeasures against mosquitoes in the summer. Too bad that's about as unpractical as the prospect of getting rid of mosquitoes altogether.

And people wonder why I have issues with nature...

How about I just turn myself into cold-blooded lizard so mosquitoes will no longer bother me? Would that work?