[watsisname]

I think people are just trying to get you to flip your ****, Lorric.

[MP-Ryan]

Mosquitoes will never have my sympathies

Given that kilo for kilo the body count might be of the same order of magnitude, I don't see any reason not to kill any mosquito dumb enough to try to take a bite out of me.

...and every one of their little bastard friends within swatting range.

Mosquitos are a blight.  I read a scientific blog a while back that made a serious argument for eradicating them, seeing as they are not a primary and irreplaceable food source for anything.

[MP-Ryan]

Deathfun is probably a sociopath going by his latest comment.

Don't start that nonsense again.

Are you capable of it?

Just so we're clear, every human being is both able and capable of killing another given the correct set of circumstances.  Anyone who claims otherwise either doesn't know themselves as well as they think they do or has a limited capacity for imagination.

[jg18]

Mosquitoes will never have my sympathies

Given that kilo for kilo the body count might be of the same order of magnitude, I don't see any reason not to kill any mosquito dumb enough to try to take a bite out of me.

...and every one of their little bastard friends within swatting range.

Mosquitos are a blight.  I read a scientific blog a while back that made a serious argument for eradicating them, seeing as they are not a primary and irreplaceable food source for anything.

I always liked this quote:

It's not so much how busy you are, but why you are busy. The bee is praised; the mosquito is swatted.

[Black Wolf]

Mosquitoes will never have my sympathies

Given that kilo for kilo the body count might be of the same order of magnitude, I don't see any reason not to kill any mosquito dumb enough to try to take a bite out of me.

...and every one of their little bastard friends within swatting range.

Mosquitos are a blight.  I read a scientific blog a while back that made a serious argument for eradicating them, seeing as they are not a primary and irreplaceable food source for anything.

The adults maybe, but the larvae are pretty critical in most freshwater ecosystems. Mozzies have been around hundreds of millions of years after all, and they're right down the bottom of most food chains - I'd take a lot of convincing that the world's ecosystems have been essentially ignoring them as a food source for all that time.

[deathfun]

You know Black Wolf, I never thought of that... with their larvae being important to the freshwater ecosystems

Then again, all I've ever known were the mosquito larvae growing in my backyard and whatever bloody pool of water they could find
They weren't exactly brimming with ecosystems given the fact they were created the night before, and stuck around long enough for those blood sucking bastards to breed from it

That and the city didn't seem too concerned when they brought out the fogging trucks
Which was awesome, not going to lie. It was a fog of pure death to mosquitoes ...though at this point they've probably developed tolerances amongst the survivors

[Nuke]

its almost fishing season. i usually have a ritualized torture-murder session that comes after landing a fish, it involves a slow disembowelment with care taken to make sure the fish survives every cut and slice, and then remove the organs in order of increasing necessity. and finally i take off the head in a slow sawing motion. then i take their corpses home and fry them in a lemon butter sauce. i kinda want to apply those techniques to hunting, but i always end up hitting something critical and the buck dies before i can make it long for death.

I call bull****.

It's a fish, it'll die pretty soon from suffocation after it has been landed anyway.

And if you make things you want to eat die in that manner, it will drastically reduce the quality of the meat.

fish seem to be capable of living for extended periods out of water. ive had one get away because i didnt whack em in the head hard enough, he jumped out of the bucket and wiggled his way to the water. and this was several minutes after i caught him, i had time to re-bait and cast (twice). this is also why i started torture murdering them, because if they wish for death, they wont try to escape.

[yuezhi]

judging by your logic i guess you method of cockroach extermination doesn't end with a shoe.

[karajorma]

The adults maybe, but the larvae are pretty critical in most freshwater ecosystems. Mozzies have been around hundreds of millions of years after all, and they're right down the bottom of most food chains - I'd take a lot of convincing that the world's ecosystems have been essentially ignoring them as a food source for all that time.

Indeed. The adults are fairly important too cause they are so packed with nutrients (what with being packed full of blood half the time).

Doesn't mean we shouldn't kill them. They need a ****ing strong selection pressure to realise humans simply aren't worth biting.

[Flipside]

If I remember correctly, it's female mosquitoes that are the problem, last I heard, there may be pheromone based methods of convincing the females to (a) not breed as voraciously and (b) convincing them not to bite humans. Whilst that method may take effort on the part of humans when working near mosquitoes, such as sprays etc, it's probably ecologically less risky than culling them.

The real problem in much of the world is the fact that there are already protections developed, but they simply are not available, or are too expensive to have any real impact on the local population, my own suspicion is that the answer to the Malaria problem is a human-centric, not mosquito-centric one.

Edit: I also seem to recall another problem in that there are now breeds of mosquito that are immune to the usual pesticides, because they are the offspring of those that have survived generation after generation of being sprayed with it.

[watsisname]

Yeah, we're slowly but surely evolving all sorts of superbugs.  :/

Ethical/ecological points aside, I don't think it's even remotely feasible to destroy mosquitoes entirely save for some sort of genetic modification campaign -- they are so numerous and widespread, and this will increase further in a warmer world.  Changing their behaviors is an interesting idea though.

[Lorric]

I think people are just trying to get you to flip your ****, Lorric.

I think Deathfun is truthful, but I don't believe Nuke.

Mosquitoes will never have my sympathies

Given that kilo for kilo the body count might be of the same order of magnitude, I don't see any reason not to kill any mosquito dumb enough to try to take a bite out of me.

...and every one of their little bastard friends within swatting range.

Mosquitos are a blight.  I read a scientific blog a while back that made a serious argument for eradicating them, seeing as they are not a primary and irreplaceable food source for anything.

I won't get in the way of mosquito-killing, but wiping them out entirely is risky, you can't undo what is done.

Deathfun is probably a sociopath going by his latest comment.

Don't start that nonsense again.

Are you capable of it?

Just so we're clear, every human being is both able and capable of killing another given the correct set of circumstances.  Anyone who claims otherwise either doesn't know themselves as well as they think they do or has a limited capacity for imagination.

If Deathfun isn't a sociopath, tell me what he is. The comment about having no scale of enjoyment also makes me think he is a sociopath. Anyway, we can just say he's sick and be right about that.

The question wasn't is he capable of killing a human, I don't know where you got that from. The question was is he capable of feeling sympathy.

[Lorric]

its almost fishing season. i usually have a ritualized torture-murder session that comes after landing a fish, it involves a slow disembowelment with care taken to make sure the fish survives every cut and slice, and then remove the organs in order of increasing necessity. and finally i take off the head in a slow sawing motion. then i take their corpses home and fry them in a lemon butter sauce. i kinda want to apply those techniques to hunting, but i always end up hitting something critical and the buck dies before i can make it long for death.

I call bull****.

It's a fish, it'll die pretty soon from suffocation after it has been landed anyway.

And if you make things you want to eat die in that manner, it will drastically reduce the quality of the meat.

fish seem to be capable of living for extended periods out of water. ive had one get away because i didnt whack em in the head hard enough, he jumped out of the bucket and wiggled his way to the water. and this was several minutes after i caught him, i had time to re-bait and cast (twice). this is also why i started torture murdering them, because if they wish for death, they wont try to escape.

    

Soooooo, on one hand you torture murder the fish so they won't try to get away. Which is very silly in itself. On the other hand you're annoyed you keep hitting the vitals on hunting trips. And it wouldn't be better just to hit the fish harder/more often?

Care to try again, Nuke? You're funny. You haven't thought this through, have you? 

Nice to start the day with a smile.

[Nuke]

cant say im that good, but i can catch a few things. i know people who go fishing and they expect to be some kind of god, get a 50 pound salmon or some trophy fish. then just end up geting all their bait stolen by bottom feeders cause they let their lure sink too far. of course if you get your king salmon or you hundred pound halibut then you got to worry about a sea lion stealing it (or an orca). face it, you vs a thousand pound marine mammal, it doesnt take a genius to know whos gonna win that contest. you are luckey getting out of that situation without loosing your rod and you probibly wont stay very dry either. i do have a spot were i can catch my daily limit on dolly though. not bad with said lemon butter sauce. its not yours till its in the pan though.

[MP-Ryan]

Yeah, we're slowly but surely evolving all sorts of superbugs.  :/

Ethical/ecological points aside, I don't think it's even remotely feasible to destroy mosquitoes entirely save for some sort of genetic modification campaign -- they are so numerous and widespread, and this will increase further in a warmer world.  Changing their behaviors is an interesting idea though.

IIRC, there is actually a campaign where - for one malaria-carrying species in particular (not all mosquitos can carry malaria) a group of geneticists has actually bred a modified variant of the species that cannot carry malaria, and yet is capable of out-competing the wild type.  Idea is to release them into the wild and allow the modified population to wipe out the wt species and therefore wipe out malaria transmission in the process.

[watsisname]

That's intriguing!  I'd be interested in seeing more information, particularly discussion on whether there may be unintended consequences, though I can't think of any obvious ones.

[Mebber]

There's always a chance of a late "Ooops, we didn't see that coming!" if people interfere with ecosystems, i guess.

[Flipside]

I suppose the good thing about genetic manipulation is that we are, if anything, healthily paranoid about the 'biting your ass' risks in doing it, so you can be certain that any kind of introduction of replacement species would be watched incredibly closely for potential problems. The hard part is what do you do if something does go wrong. I suppose it's theoretically possible to create a sort of 'self-destruct' trigger in the new species, but even that carries it's own large set of ethical and scientific conundrums.

[Suongadon]

IIRC, there is actually a campaign where - for one malaria-carrying species in particular (not all mosquitos can carry malaria) a group of geneticists has actually bred a modified variant of the species that cannot carry malaria, and yet is capable of out-competing the wild type.  Idea is to release them into the wild and allow the modified population to wipe out the wt species and therefore wipe out malaria transmission in the process.

It was done by Hopkins genetics nerds 6-7 years ago. Problem was that they only out competed unaltered mosquitoes when they (both modified and unmodified mosquitoes) fed on malaria-infected animals, otherwise the GMsquitoes were less survivable, (if only marginally).

[The E]

Lorric: Your attempts at trying to diagnose random people with sociopathy based on their forum posts is neither appreciated nor warranted. In case you were unaware, this is the Internet, and the probability of you being trolled is much, much higher than the probability of you being correct.