Morality Mosquitoes

 Morality Mosquitoes 

We've all been at a baseball game or fireworks display, a family day at the lake or a meandering hike through the woods, a church picnic, a concert in the park, or just pulling weeds in the front flower beds, when something pricks the skin of our face or ear or neck. It's mid-summer and it has recently rained. Suddenly you're surrounded by a tiny airborne attack. Miniscule vampires on nearly silent wings. When they land on you they insert long drill-like tubes (called a proboscis) which go into the skin and find blood vessels and capillaries to drink our blood. These villains, slaked with our precious juices, release a little of their saliva which acts as a painkiller and anti-coagulant, as they remove their feeding tubes and zoom off to collect more blood from your cousins and siblings and grandma in order to feed their larvae and spread their horrible legions across your neighborhood.

It's a nightmare of prehistoric proportions. Little —literal—bloodsuckers carromming around everywhere outside in the shade or when the sun goes down, waiting to prey on us. They are sanguivores, creatures that dine on our blood. Anywhere below the arctic circle mosquitoes will eventually find you and though there are some pristine magical lands (like Liverpool) where the flying horrors are not, as yet, prevalent, it is only a matter of time before the world is coated with the horrid insects, because they are incredibly adaptive lifeforms. These awful creatures have existed for millions of years, surviving natural cataclysms and adapting to humankind's harsh treatment of their environment, including our attempt to heat up the Earth's surface to the point where no animal can survive. The hotter, more humid places on earth are ideal for mosquitoes and every year hospitals pop out more unknowing victims for these monster bugs to feed on.

Other places, especially in Central and South America, Africa, Southeast Asia, Indonesia—anywhere there are humid jungles and people—mosquitoes pose a huge threat to human life. Unlike sharks or hippos or even dogs, a bite from a mosquito can be lethal. They carry and transfer diseases to humans and animals. Called vectors, mosquitoes are the most lethal organism on the planet. They kill more humans than any other animal or insect by far. Every year, well over one million people are killed by an insect that weighs less than 2.5 milligrams, (though one might suppose they weigh more after feeding on our type O positive.)

Mosquitoes carry and transfer zika, dengue, malaria, chikungunya, West Nile and many others. Where people do not have access to health care, especially, such flying nightmares can cause horrible pain as well as death. The zika virus can lead to microcephaly, a genetic mutation that causes children to be born with very small heads and a lifetime (if they survive birth) of challenges. Malaria has no known cure, though the symptoms can be mitigated over the duration of one's life.

This raises a potent series of questions. As technologically advanced as we now are, having learned the secret of the genome and harnessed the power of genetic editing through CRISPR, why not eradicate the little pests completely and save millions of lives yearly? What's to stop us using gene warfare to breed mosquitoes to a tipping point of extinction? Wouldn't that be an example of using scientific discovery to do something measurably good? 

Anyone who has scratched at the spots where the skeeters have bitten them will nod in rapid assent. Imagine those picnics, evening pool and pond swims, canoe trips and camping adventures without being assaulted by mosquitoes. Better yet, imagine the lives that would be saved in places like Borneo and The Congo and Belize and elsewhere where mosquitoes kill hundreds of thousands yearly. 

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A few days ago, I went upstairs to get a handful of clothes hangers from the spare bedroom closet. On my way, my primitive ape brain noted something out of place high on the wall by the attic trapdoor. It took me a moment to flip through the rolodex of dangerous creatures stored in our collective genetic memory, but after a gasp of fright, I suddenly realized what it was. I immediately named him Bruce, after my favorite crime fighting vigilante in Gotham City. 

In North Carolina, we have several species of chiroptera but Bruce was a Big Brown Bat (that is their actual name) though he was tiny, almost mouse-sized. Bruce is not the first bat we've ever had in our home. They wriggle into tight places to get away from predators or out of the elements and wind up lost and away from their colonies and just hang on a wall until they can escape. It is one of the perils of living in an older home.

Bats are rabies carriers, so removal is tricky for homeowners, especially those, like me, who understand just how important these little furry flying mammals are to our local ecosystem. I was able to get Bruce out of our home, at length, with help from YouTube and some now discarded plasticware containers and a pair of heavy yard work gloves and the back cardboard piece from a notebook we use for table games. Bruce is back where he is supposed to be and doing fine (I hope). I did have some trouble getting him to a safe spot, but I hope he was able to fly back to his family.

Bruce and his fellow bats are insectivores. They eat flying bugs almost exclusively, but they especially love mosquitoes. A Big Brown Bat like Bruce, can eat up to fifty percent of their body weight in mosquitoes in one night. Pregnant or nursing bats (Mrs. Wayne, in this case) can eat upwards of 100% of their body weight in flying bloodsuckers. A bat colony can have anywhere from a dozen to three hundred bats, all swooping and zooming around the night sky eating countless death-carrying mosquitoes. 

Bats hibernate in winter, so in the final weeks of summer, they increase their calorie intake—called hyperphagia— eating even more late-summer mosquitoes to ensure they have stores to survive the colder months. 

Here in North Carolina, all bat species have been suffering a serious fungal infection called White Nose Syndrome. Hibernating bats develop or come in contact with other bats that have the infection and spread it through a colony. White-Nose Syndrome (WNS) can be fatal, killing bats in large numbers and severely reducing the populations in areas (especially suburban) where their propensity for eating skeeters is much appreciated. In years when mosquitoes seem particularly bad, it is fair to suspect that the local bats are suffering from WNS.

Bats aren’t the only animal that likes to eat mosquitoes. Fish love the wriggling larvae (mosquitoes spend their first hours under water, which is why areas near water are so likely to have real mosquito problems). Bluebirds, purple martins, robins, cardinals and (in some places) orioles also hunt mosquitoes during the daylight hours. Making sure there are plenty of bird feeders around in the summer will help keep the mosquito populations down, as well as providing our feathered friends a natural tasty snack (for them, anyway). Some people, too, put up bat houses to encourage bats to roost nearby, and therefore help to encourage the natural predation of the unwanted pests.

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I mention bats and birds and fish, mainly because these are animals that might also suffer if we decided to eliminate skeeters from the planet. Even so, it is worth considering the power we have to eradicate this most dangerous of pests. Right now, if science was unhindered by the moral and ethical quandaries of such an act, we could unleash a small but lethal cloud of gene-modified mosquitoes, ready to mate with existing wild skeeters, rendering the next generation of dastardly buzzers completely sterile. In one life cycle of mosquitoes, we could end a natural tyranny that has decimated whole nations' worth of humans and crippled countless others. As a used-car salesman might ask in another context, what's not to like?

Science, despite its apparent power to change things for the better, is intrinsically tied to questions of ethics. In almost every theater of discovery in the modern world, scientists ask reflexively, despite whether or not we can do a thing; should we do it? Except where bond villain-like billionaires with rocket envy and cash to burn usurp science as a means to wave their unhinged power at us (and signal their Freudian fascination with the phallus) science is almost always willing to pause before rather than after using its awesome powers for change.

This is most certainly not always the case, but generally, science-based research also takes the philosophical questions of morality and ethics to heart, too, asking in advance what the consequences might be. This is why total mosquito obliteration has stalled. We simply cannot know what kind of ecological damage could ensue if we remove an entire lifeform from the planet.

Of course, the irony is that, every day, whole species go extinct. Many, even as you read this, are added to an endangered species list. Animals that used to reign supreme on this tiny blue life-giving planet have long since been completely destroyed, largely from over hunting or eradication of their natural habitats. So why are we so concerned—if we've killed the DoDo already—what will happen if we commit genocide against organisms that we know beyond doubt kill vast numbers of humans every year? After all, mosquitoes do not care about us. They use us as a food source, but even if humanity went extinct because of a mosquito-borne illness, they would have other creatures to feast on. They are simply fulfilling their purpose within the web of nature, unconsciously obeying an eons-old moral imperative to survive. 

The problem is that, very much like with humans, the entire catalog of species of mosquitoes, numbering about 3,000, aren’t all bad. Some mosquito populations never come into contact with people or livestock and don’t become vectors for diseases that can maim and kill. But here is the absolutely salient point: some do. Those mosquitoes cause unbearable casualties to humanity every year.

So are we trying to eradicate all mosquitoes or just the ones that do the most harm? Of the three-thousand species of skeeters, only three are the most likely to act as vectors of deadly diseases. Rather than destroying all of the bugs (a particularly human thing to want to do) we could just eliminate the species that are most dangerous, and hope that the remaining species which do not transmit diseases can stand in as ecological replacements without harming other creatures that depend on them as a primary food source (like Bruce and his batty family). There are arguments for and against eliminating certain kinds of mosquitoes, especially in suburban neighborhoods where rainwater, retention ponds, storm creeks (like in our backyard) and other “standing water” create a beautiful place for mosquitoes to lay their eggs and make battalions of cookout-ruining offspring.

However, one thing that science is working on is discovering why skeeters love us. Something about our smell sends these bugs into ecstasies, like an old aristocratic vampire seeing a buxom farm girl coming back from the well after nightfall, our blood is a delicious treat for mosquitoes and they seem to love some people more than others. Scientists are working on that very thing. If we can take a pill or receive genetic therapies that make us repulsive to skeeters, it might be a very simple and relatively safe solution. We no longer get the diseases they carry, they get to go on replicating in their nightmare reality and feeding bats and birds and fish.

However we eventually solve this serious problem, it’s important to remember that no solution is final. Total eradication is the action of unthoughtful impulse. Science is carefully weighing the consequences of how to end a serious and deadly problem without causing further unintended consequences. This is the work of philosophy, because whenever morality and ethics are involved, modern philosophy is right there (or ought to be, looking at you, billionaires) at the forefront. And, to quote Dr. Ian Malcom, a character from Michael Crichton’s brilliant novel and movie, Jurassic Park, regardless of how we proceed to save lives and end a reign of buzzing and biting and bloodsucking terror, “Life, uh, finds a way”.