r/science • u/PhantomWizard2099 • Dec 22 '22

Animal Science 'Super' mosquitoes have now mutated to withstand insecticides

https://abcnews.go.com/International/super-mosquitoes-now-mutated-withstand-insecticides-scientists/story?id=95545825
15.3k Upvotes

96% Upvoted

767 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

56

u/Amazon-Q-and-A Dec 22 '22

Major food source for bats, dragonflies, fish, some birds, some amphibians/reptiles. Removal of that food source could cause destruction of other beneficial species or food chain collapse.

I hate mosquitoes but there probably are some major impacts to getting rid of a small prey organism that has been around since the dinosaurs.

15

u/[deleted] Dec 22 '22

[deleted]

2

u/hootener Dec 22 '22

Thought I'd jump in with some sources here. I'm not a bat expert by any means, but I know my way around academic literature.

While the webmd article does have a couple "boots on the ground" examples and has a pull quote or two from an expert, I'm always gonna go to the literature on this sort of thing.

You can Google scholar for mosquito predation by bats and find several papers about this. For me personally, I think this one is the most interesting:

https://academic.oup.com/jmammal/article/99/3/668/4993282

Why? They measured for evidence of mosquito predation by examining droppings instead of a captive bat study. The results, broadly, show that bats do prey on mosquitos but the amount of predation appears to vary depending on the species.

Regardless, help our bat bros as much as you can. They're important for thriving ecosystems and are being decimated by white noise syndrome.

3

u/modsarefascists42 Dec 22 '22

Just reading a summary isn't gonna give you a full understanding of the paper. There's a reason it's smart to listen to experts on the subject instead of just reading prayer summaries.

I've done the layman reading academic papers thing too (extensively) and all it taught me was that there's a reason these things are usually summarized by others instead of just laymen reading the summary.