A World Without Mosquitoes

                So your fishing in the middle of the summer have a good time until bzzzzzzz, what seems to be a huge cloud of mosquitoes covers the lake and start swarming all around you. Times like these are the reason you unload half a can of OFF on your body before you go anywhere in the outdoors. So if you could would you eradicate mosquitoes from the face of the earth? This is the same question that lots of people are asking them selves, and coming up with the answer: yes, but they have no idea what and how this choice would effect the earth’s ecosystem.

                “A World Without Mosquitoes” was the title of an article we read in biology class last week and it brought up very interesting things related to how the ecosystem would be effected with a lack of mosquitoes. Scientists in the article were on both sides of the argument and all brought up interesting facts about mosquitoes that I never knew. They talk about how mosquitoes affect the tundra initially and all of the things they influence there, and then they move on to the fish side of things. After this the plants side of thing is brought up and how marshy plants use mosquitoes. And finally it’s brought up that mosquitoes help pollination and things like this. A five paragraph “discussion” brings the article to a close and it is here that the aspect of how there isn’t much that mosquitoes do that can’t be done by other organisms besides spreading disease.

                My opinion on the “argument” is probably not welcomed nicely with most people. I think that mosquitoes aren’t here by mistake and that they defiantly have a purpose, even if it isn’t very big. I do agree that mosquitoes are VERY annoying and I pretty much hate them, but when you take into perspective the effect they have on a place like the tundra, where caribou migration routes are decided by where mosquitoes will and won’t be, it shows you how big of an effect they have. So do mosquitoes need to be wiped off the face of the earth? That’s a question I’ll let you decide the answer to.     

Ecosystem Services

Up until today I never even heard of the title “Ecosystem Services” before. Ecosystem Services are The product or functions that nature provides which are of great value to people  Some of them include clean water and air, pollination, fish in the ocean, storm protection, ect…  All of things are vital to our existence and help us everyday without our realizing it at all, and are often taken for granted.

In the world today everything’s worth is based on a dollar value, so nature really gets short handed by people. The problem is you can’t put a monetary value on nature, so it often gets left out of discussions and is never given credit for what it does and people end up not caring and it. Hurricane Katrina was a good example of what happens when you don’t realize what you’ve done till it’s too late; the absence of wet lands was a little piece that made the storm worse.

Personally this was a vey interesting thing to learn about and the dynamics that it includes. I received a better understanding of hurricane Katrina and part of why it was so bad, and I was given a different way to look at nature and its resources now.