Eli5: What benefits are we getting from mosquitoes and cockroaches why cant we just eradicate them/are they that vital to the food chain?
In: Biology
All those delicious farm fresh eggs with the yolks so orange they dye your pancakes orange that you get from your friend out in the country?
Yeah, those chickens love roaches.
But in addition to the chickens eating the bugs, it would be hard to “take out” mosquitos and roaches because anything that kills them will likely kill other similar insects and not only affect the parts of the food web based on roaches and mosquitos, but the parts that depend on water striders, flour beetles, springtails, isopods, etc.
Cockroaches are insanely well adapted to survive. Humans get a VERY high score on the adaptability/survival scale, but they are several levels ahead of us. Almost anything we can throw at them, they can shrug off.
They will absolutely outlive us on this planet.
I recall reading that mosquitos in GENERAL play a big part in the food web, but the mosquito species that bite us could go away without much ecological impact.
Of course it’d be an expensive undertaking without a huge benefit (there are other creatures that bite us and infest our homes). Not to mention the risk that we simply don’t know everything about how ecosystems work.
A species that spreads diseases amongst an other species, that basically eliminated every other mechanism that limited it’s population, can’t be that bad for the ecosystems.
Didn’t China do something like this, and then the bird population went endangered in those areas because they eat all the insects?
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