25.2.07

To Kingdom Come...

For some strange reason, i wonder if there's any species of animal/plant that Greenpeace, WWF and their ilk DO NOT want to conserve/protect. Something like a 'Do Not Call' list for animals must be there...??

My candidate for the list is the Mosquito.
What good does it do for humans?
What contribution does it make to the food cycle, food chain and other biology-related diagrams?
Does it have (what a fellow blogger writes about all the time and bores us with) a "Purpose of Life"??
According to Wikipedia (may the makers/conceptualisers/promoters be blessed with a million years of happiness) only the female mosquito sucks blood, that too just because she doesn't get protein from nectar, which makes blood a special treat. Which means we are the mosquito equivalent of chocolate cake.
And the nectar-sucking is not pollinating, so no plants will suffer if they die.
Not to mention the number of diseases that will stop spreading if they don't exist.

Should the mosquito heading towards extinction sound an(other) alarm bell (these environmental alarm bells seem to ring every few hours)?? Will Greenpeace activists get onto a fuel-cell or steam-run truck and try to block mosquito exterminators from doing their work?

Will i become a social pariah for suggesting genocide of mosquitoes?

8 comments:

pappu poppins said...

i think this is interesting...
sorry to translate it into third year architectural syllabus but its 11:16pm, Sunday and i just got home from college... so my head is full of all that...

i can make a whole list of subjects which do NO good to anybody...!!!

Mukul said...

tu bahut hi philosophical banda hai..

Nimita said...

Mosquitoes help distinguish the sweet people from the salty ones.

Also notice all your titles are 'to be continued' titles with "..." after each. None are stand-alone titles, except for "S,M,X,XL"

Nimita said...

And I forgot to mention I'm a mosquito-magnet(...)

Adi said...

Ah...you see siddharth... In saying that "mosquitoes serve no purpose" you have just become another example the Humankind's need to place ITSELF at the centre of things.... You must realise that WE are an accidental offshoot of the evolutionary process and that WE too don't really contribute much to the environment... The mosquito helps the malarial and other parasites with their life cycle and although this is inconvenient for us it no reason to believe that they have any less reason to be here than we do... Our frenzied clapping of hands in the mosquito's presence is quite inconvenient for it too :-)

Siddharth said...

ok tat answers the last question

Adi said...

BY the last question you mean this one? - "Will i become a social pariah for suggesting genocide of mosquitoes?"

Well no... The comment i made is not because i sympathise with Greenpeace or any other such organisation... In fact, i would be quite happy if someone can come up with a strategy for the complete eradication of mosquitoes, bed bugs, fleas, lice etc etc... However, this is solely because their presence is irritating... But to say that the reason for extermination is their ecological insignificance is logically flawed :-)

Mukul said...

sid, aage bolo..