I remember the time in 1st grade (or so), when a teacher told me that man was the only creature that created his own living spaces. I pointed out that birds made nests and she shot back that nest building was only instinct. Other kids pointed out ants and bees and rodents that make tunnels and she claimed that man was the only animal that changed the environment to suit themselves. I brought up beavers then the subject got changed. Probably my first experience in not trusting what I was taught.
I agree that chart is an oversimplification. One thing missing from the chart is empathy. Iâve had ferrets and cats that could definitely tell if I was feeling ill and their behavior would change.
Iâve forget the content and name, but in philosophy, I remember a scale of humanity with the bottom being:
taking care of needs; hungry, thirst, shelter
and then increasing with:
doing the right thing to avoid punishment
doing the right thing for a reward
doing the right thing because it is right
Iâve probably forgotten a few of the items, but the point was that many animals can do the right thing while many humans fail.
Hedging their bets some by saying most birds and most fish. I think they missed out on reptiles though. Crocodiles are great parents, on top of other clever behaviors like using sticks to lure in nesting birds.
Also for the record âmaternal behaviorâ is some serious mammal bias. There is a good chance that in the first birds it was the father that looked after the nest, as seen in types like ostriches, and itâs the rule for uniparental care in fish.
I honestly donât know the answer to this⌠Like, I fucking hate mosquitos, and the fact that they are excellent spreaders of disease just adds to that⌠but how does taking an entire species out of the food change impact said food chain?
Iâm from the year of (among other words) backslash, compact disk, email, first world problem, napa cabbage, power-up, RGB and space elevator.
As I understand it, it depends hugely on the species and its niche. With most mosquitoes, I would imagine other mosquito species would fill up the vacated niche, with fairly small overall effects.
And of course there critters like Aedes aegypti, or the yellow fever mosquito, which is invasive in the New World; if we could target them precisely for extinction, it would probably help various native mosquitoes as a serious competitor was eliminated. And it would significantly reduce the spread of dengue, yellow fever and malaria, maybe zika virus, too.
Similarly, the seven species of Anopheles gambiae mosquitoes are the primary vector for malaria. (There are something like sixty other Anopheles mosquitoes that can also spread malaria to humans, but their effects are minor compared to A. gambiae, and couple of hundred other species in the same genus that either donât carry the malaria parasite, or donât attack humans.) If we could eliminate those particular species of mosquitoes, weâd stop almost all malaria infections.
If there was a magic button I could press, to make either of the mentioned mosquitoes extinct, Iâd hit it so fast and hard Iâd probably break a finger. But there isnât, and AFAIK, we canât (yet, at least) wipe those particular mosquitoes out without killing a lot of other, less harmful or harmless insects and causing collateral trouble.
âspace elevatorâ had not yet been added to the Library of Congress list of subject headings when I retired two years ago, so good luck cataloguing anything about them. All we could do was use âelevatorsâ and âouter spaceâ as two separate headings.
I noticed in perusing around the late '70s and early '80s that a lot of the newly added words are words from other languages or cultures. There were several additions of the names of First Nations and Native American tribes, bahn mi, and maki. So maybe itâs a case of the dictionaryâs got most of those now, because it stopped ignoring that those words existed and are used in American English.
So just to be pedantic, malaria comes from a protozoan. Thatâs part of why itâs so difficult to treat. Bacteria have different ribosomes and cell walls and things that our antibiotics can target with being too toxic to our own cells. The really problematic ones are mostly types like MRSA that have been selected to break down our drugs first.
Protozoans on the other hand have cells basically just like ours, so it is very hard to find treatments other than poisoning yourself and hoping they die first. In the case of malaria, the one thing it does thatâs special is break down hemoglobin so it can hide in our blood cells, and I think most of our treatments are based on interfering with that.
I suppose since the mosquitoes are also victims of malaria, one could in theory help stop the disease by figuring out how to engineer and spread new resistant breeds?
But what depends on eating mosquitoes? There are lots of little flies that are a lot like them, including non-biting midges. So I think their importance is probably subtler, coming down to how many flies an environment actually supports. The blood makes more larvae, and the larvae live different ways â mosquitoes live at the top in stagnant water, but for instance black flies need flowing water. Iâm guessing the biggest difference might be for aquatic predators.
I doubt too many things would depend on just a single type of mosquito like Anopheles gambiae but I wouldnât be too surprised if something out there did.
