What would the world look like without mosquitoes?

The mosquito—tiny, frail, eminently squishable, and yet capable of such destruction. 

Mosquitoes are once again in the news, due to rising concerns of the diseases they can carry and transmit to humans.

In late August, residents of Oxford, Massachusetts were asked to abide by a voluntary evening curfew—an effort to protect them from a rare but potentially deadly disease known as eastern equine encephalitis. Anthony Fauci, former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, also made headlines after West Nile virus landed him in the hospital.

“This is prime season for both of these diseases,” says Erin Staples, a medical epidemiologist with the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The U.S. typically sees over 1,200 cases and a hundred deaths a year from West Nile, she says—but only between three and 15 cases of EEE.

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While there are several easy ways to help protect yourself against mosquito-borne diseases, there’s another solution that sounds appealing whenever news of mosquito-borne illnesses reaches a fever point:

What if we could just—poof—make all the mosquitoes disappear? And would there be any repercussions for their ecosystems—or for us?

Where mosquitoes fit on the food chain

Of course, no one knows for certain what a world would look like without mosquitoes.

“Removing mosquitoes entirely could have consequences we can't predict,” says Ann Froschauer, a public affairs specialist for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.  

The overarching problem is we don't know enough about how mosquitoes fit into the food chain—even though there are around 3,500 species of mosquito on this planet.

Plenty of research has unraveled food webs of bigger mammals, such as lions or leopards. And for good reason—they're much easier to observe than tiny mosquitoes, which often breed in temporary pools of water.  

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What we do know is that mosquitoes of all ages and sexes serve as a food source for all kinds of creatures, such as fish, turtles, dragonflies, migratory songbirds, and bats. 

Moreover, males in many mosquito species eat only nectar, making some species major pollinators of plants such as some crops and flowers—even orchids. 

What about bats?  

Perhaps more than any other animal, bats are often touted as being the mosquito’s greatest nemesis. Surely removing all the mosquitoes would affect bats more than most? 

Not so, says Winifred Frick, a bat biologist at the University of California, Santa Cruz. 

Most bats are actually generalist predators, meaning they eat whatever they can catch—mosquito, beetle, or otherwise.

“There aren’t any bat species that specialize specifically on mosquitoes,” says Frick.  

In fact, some mosquito species are most active during the day, meaning bats would have very few opportunities to feed on them at all.

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Furthermore, the methods we would use to eradicate mosquitoes, such as pesticides like DDT, might end up being more deadly to bats than having less prey, she says.

“I’d worry that the collateral damage of extensive pesticide spraying could have very dire impacts on bats as well as other wildlife,” says Frick. 

Obviously, if you remove an animal from these ecosystems, something would change, says Marm Kilpatrick, a disease ecologist at University of California-Santa Cruz. But would the impact be something the average person would notice?

“I’ll say that we don’t know the answer, but my hunch would be no,” says Kilpatrick. 

A world without disease? 

The eradication of mosquitoes would have massive consequences for global health, however. 

In all, mosquitoes account for more than 700,000 human deaths each year.

Mosquitoes are the primary vector for malaria, so if they disappeared, malaria certainly would too. According to the World Health Organization, about 608,000 people died from malaria in 2022. 

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Mosquitoes also transmit the dengue virus, which claims 21,000 human lives each year, as well as yellow fever, which accounts for yet another 30,000 deaths annually.

But we might not need to eradicate mosquitoes to turn these numbers around. In recent years, researchers have made promising breakthroughs in preventing disease transmission by infecting mosquitoes with parasitic bacteria, sterilizing mosquitoes with radiation, and even tweaking mosquitoes’ genomes using CRISPR technology.

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And it’s important to remember that not all mosquito species are responsible for this destruction. In fact, many want nothing to do with us.

“There’s some species that live in wetlands that will feed predominantly on frogs and other amphibians,” says Michael Hutchinson, an entomologist with the Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture. “So you could be sitting in the wetland, and if there were tens of thousands of those mosquitoes around, you would not be bit at all. They’re just not interested.”

There are also mosquito species in which the females are also not known to be bloodsuckers. In fact, some mosquitoes, such as those in the genus Toxorhynchites, actually hunt other mosquitoes during their aquatic larval stage.

“It’s actually our biggest mosquito we have in Pennsylvania, and lucky for us, they don’t bite,” says Hutchinson.

Ultimately, whether or not the total eradication of mosquitoes is even possible—it probably isn't—there's still so much we don’t understand about what biologist E.O. Wilson once called "the little things that run the world."