Going back to the conversations we've had in the Zika thread[1], why are we OK with eliminating the Guinea Worm, but not certain species of mosquitoes?
A lot of people in that thread made the argument that we shouldn't exterminate a species without first fully understanding the consequences. Yet we seem to be doing that here with this parasite, and no one seems to be saying, "but... think of the ecosystem!"
One factor is that there is a lot less "we" involved with the Guinea Worm.
I mean, good luck suppressing the knowledge that filtering your drinking water through a cloth prevents a devastating episode where a 3 foot worm crawls out of your body.
The proposed programs for eradicating mosquitoes involve things like releasing millions of dollars of genetically modified mosquitoes and putting larvicides and insecticides in all known bodies of standing water.
The fact that we've unintentionally wiped out so many species lends credence to the idea that, on average, very few individual specie are all that important. Of course, just leave it to us to find the exception someday...
And introduced destructive species like kudzu and the grey squirrel. These have results which are certainly bad, but far far away from causing any kind of catastrophic ecological collapse.
The demise of the Red Squirrel (in the UK) maybe more due the the loss of habitat than than because of the Grey Squirrel. The Grey Squirrel may just be a convenient scapegoat.
With mosquitos the discussion does tend to meander around what I see as the core issue: the wisdom of developing and field testing a technology capable of eradicating a target species.
Mosquitoes are an essential part of the diet of many species: birds, spiders, toads, small rodents. The assumption is that those species could find replacements, but it is still a major change.
The Guinea worm presumably does not represent a significant ecological step.
>>Mosquitoes are an essential part of the diet of many species: birds, spiders, toads, small rodents. The assumption is that those species could find replacements, but it is still a major change.
According to one of the commenters in the Zika thread, who claims to have done research on the issue, there are no known species that feed primarily on mosquitoes. Therefore, eradicating them would probably not cause too much damage.
I agree with the idea of the unknown consequences of eliminating pieces of ecosystems. We've seen the impact of the removal of apex predators like wolves, and movements like rewilding champion the idea of reintroduction, rebalancing of the ecosystem through brining such animals back. So we seem to think that maintaining ecosystems is important now. Complexity theory and modeling could be very useful to "estimating" the impact of eradication, I'm not sure how the impact is being evaluated though. (In the future can man-made animals step in and play vital positions in ecosystems, like biological shims when we realize the importance or primary role a species played within that ecosystem?)
The obvious ecological impact of erradicating the guinea worm is decreased pressure on the population of Humans. However, most people would agree that it is not ethical to intentionally allow diseases to roam free as a way to control the size of human populations...
As a contrarian in these topics, without being able to prove it, i assume that nothing terribly Bad can come from exterminating a species, even if it were bees, and their connections to the ecosystem are well understood. Nature is a rough place as niches tend to fill up extremely fast.
So if we were to exterminate mosquitos, my gut says we'd survive it. But luckily my gut doesnt make Policy.
Nature rebalances extremely fast but its does so by catastrophically changing into a different state instead of having old niches be refilled. One of the famous examples is how experimentally removing starfish (a sea urchin predator) from a kelp forest resulted in an explosion of the sea urchin population and a transformation of the kelp forest into a "sea urchin desert".
There was a nice article linked in HN about this recently:
I'm absolutely ok with eliminating most (or all, really) species of mosquitoes.
I'm optimistic that in the (very near) future the ability to do this rests with a few people who decide it is worth doing, and worth spending single digit millions of dollars to do it, vs. any organization with a deliberative, democratic process.
It would be hilarious to successfully wipe out mosquitoes and then have people try to sue (or governments attempt criminal charges).
Erradicating a parasite like the the guinea worm is a bit like erradicating Smallpox or Polio. The ecossystem impact that you would expect is a change in human population due to the improved health.
However, we consider it more ethical to control the size of the human population with voluntary birth control instead of terrible diseases :)
Unlike the Guinea worm, mosquitos are non-specific predators. Guinea worm can be eliminated by having a season without any humans infected, the only way to get rid of mosquitoes is to kill, every single one.
> There is no vaccine for Guinea worm, because the parasite induces no immune response.
So, eradicating it might lead to the loss of some knowledge, on how it doesn't trigger some immune response. Specially because if you pull the worm, it retracts and causes infection, so the mechanism might not be that simple.
Even more: few years ago (2013) [1], it was expected that soon it would have been eliminated, because dogs had their own species of guinea worm and wouldn't substitute human beings as the necessarily step in the worm life cycle.
I remember a story about a worm that is extracted using a stick: the worm is presented with the stick, wrap itself around it and you can pull it out. Presumably, that image of a long animal around a stick as a healing process is what gave the caducean, the symbol to medicine of a snake around a stick.
I was not aware of this before a long trip through wikipedia (triggered because I'd never seen that word before), but there's apparently some controversy over use of the Caduceus vs the Rod of Asclepius.
Basically, the US Army used it by mistake and so it's taken over in the United States, but people think that the one-snake version (RoA) is more correct. The RoA is thought to be perhaps rooted in the treatment for Guinea Worm (or else based on a magical healing snake kept by Moses).
Yup: girlfriend is an MD, I learnt the hard way to deactivate Google Image before any medical search. I would ban any relation to dermatology from GI if I could.
I wonder how much danger there is of the worm finding a new host species. I mean an animal other than dog and possibly harder to control. That would be a disastrous outcome.
Little danger, I guess. The eradication program introduces no new evolutionary pressure on worms' lavae living in water. Those filtered out or killed in their hosts are removed from the gene pool anyway.
On the other hand, we may discover more such preexisting hosts, as dogs. A parasitic relationship that evolved over a much longer period than a few mere decades and evolving from a much larger population than the few individuals thought to remain in the wild.
> introduces no new evolutionary pressure on worms' lavae living in water
not being able to reproduce (by infecting a human, which is required in the reproductive cycle) is just as real of a new evolutionary pressure as dying is.
The male Guinea worm dies, but the female worm incubates in a person’s body for a year, where it grows three to five feet long. It forms a horribly painful and itchy blister until it erupts through the flesh of the legs, arms or even chest
>There is no vaccine for Guinea worm, because the parasite induces no immune response.
The lack of immune response could be interesting to investigate scientifically for designing implants. I'm sure the Save the Guinea Worm guy would be delighted to play host as you suggest.
More importantly than implants, a better understanding of the immune response against worms would help the development of vaccines. There are other parasitic worms out there, such as schistossoma, that we are nowhere near from erradicating and for which a vaccine would help tremendously.
However, researchers unfortunately do not get much funding to study these neglected tropical diseases...
I imagine the backlash against trying to eradicate mosquitos - the disappearance of which had all but proven to have a minuscule (if at all measurable) impact on the planet, and would save an insane number of human lives - as being thunderous. So it's cute that there's someone pulling for the Guinea Worm - even if it is satirical.
[1]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12322885
A lot of people in that thread made the argument that we shouldn't exterminate a species without first fully understanding the consequences. Yet we seem to be doing that here with this parasite, and no one seems to be saying, "but... think of the ecosystem!"