Go to the north. Wait. Wait until the sky darkens and you are afraid to venture outside. Then say that mosquitoes don't matter. There is some evidence that they consume more caribou, by weight, than the wolves.
I went to grad school with a lot of ecologists (not an ecologist myself). I've seen countless presentations about anthropogenic threats to all kinds of ecosystems. I've never seen anything that included mosquitoes as anything but a disease vector, and I've heard numerous opinions saying that mosquitoes are the one class of animal whose absence would not be noticed by the ecosystem. To back that claim up, I have the micro-review in Nature that I linked above. You can find more sources by following the citation web from it.
Gene drives are certainly a powerful and dangerous technology. But if you want to argue against using a gene drive on mosquitoes from a scientific standpoint, you need to present scientific evidence.
> I've never seen anything that included mosquitoes as anything but a disease vector,
There are entire branches of ecology studying (among other things) the role of mosquitoes in ecosystems. Limnology for example.
> I've heard numerous opinions saying that mosquitoes are the one class of animal whose absence would not be noticed by the ecosystem
Define "numerous"
I can't understand how somebody could claim that nothing will occur if we wipe an entire "class" of animals comprising more than 3000 species and that are linked with almost all in freshwater ecosystems in its quadruple role of prey, predator, pollinisator and vector. Hundred of species of vertebrates of economic interest to man depend on them, probably.
The question is if "Mosquitoes fill an important niche in a great many ecologies".
The Nature article that ak217 linked to describes the north as the primary special case: "Taken all together, then, mosquitoes would be missed in the Arctic — but is the same true elsewhere?"
Otherwise, they don't seem to have a key niche, eg, as a food source for insect-eaters.
> Ultimately, there seem to be few things that mosquitoes do that other organisms can't do just as well — except perhaps for one. They are lethally efficient at sucking blood from one individual and mainlining it into another, providing an ideal route for the spread of pathogenic microbes.
It ends with a quote:
> "They don't occupy an unassailable niche in the environment," says entomologist Joe Conlon, of the American Mosquito Control Association in Jacksonville, Florida. "If we eradicated them tomorrow, the ecosystems where they are active will hiccup and then get on with life. Something better or worse would take over."
Thus, the article argues that mosquitoes do not fill an important niche in a great many ecologies, though they definitely fill an important niche in the arctic.
