What Purpose Does the Mosquito Serve?

I'm from a small town in West Texas where the temperature is almost always too hot for mosquitoes to survive for long after the spring months. When temperatures are over 100 degrees in the shade and standing water boils, mosquitoes don't last long in my town!

For the last month or so, I've been visiting a friend in the Galveston area, where humidity is, well, horrendous, especially when compared to my dry desert hometown. With humidity (and water) comes pests of the flying and buzzing variety: mosquitoes.

My son is very allergic to the bite of a mosquito, and he has had to take Benadryl to keep the bite area from swelling. Even bug repellant isn't keeping the pesty mosquito away from him!

Our veterinarian told us to be sure we gave our dog his heartworm medicine prior to making the trip, since several of the diseases and parasites a dog can die from can be transmitted by the mosquito.

According to one study performed by the University of Saint Louis, over 700 million people get some sort of a disease caused by a mosquito each year.

While I sat treading water in my best friends swimming pool and listened to the sound of the big trucks in her city driving by and spraying the entire city to rid it (or at least reduce) the population of mosquitoes, I had to wonder, "Do mosquitoes serve any useful purpose or are they simply pests?"

Apparently, mosquitoes do at the very least have a place on the food chain. Mosquitoes and mosquito larvae both make a nice meal for several animals, including some variety of fish, dragonflies, some birds and bats. Of course, I also discovered that these same mosquito predators also feed on other insects and as such mosquitoes aren't necessary to feed them.

The mosquitofish can actually eat up almost 200 mosquito larvae in about a day. At this point, I'd love to get a batch of mosquito fish for a pond in my yard! I wonder if that would keep the population of mosquitoes down or if it would attract them more? I'm not sure I'm willing to take the chance!

However, besides just being a pest and a snack to other animals, mosquitoes do indeed have a purpose in the ecosystem. Apparently, mosquitoes eat and filter or strain particles of bacteria, fungi, and algae from water systems, thus making water safer. There is a large enough population of mosquitoes that they make a measurable impact on the environment.

I was surprised to learn that as pesty as they are, mosquitoes disappearing completely would send the entire ecosystem into a tailspin and drastically change our environment.

It's really hard to believe that pesty little buzzing sound in your ear right before you slap yourself to kill the little mosquito bugger can have such a huge impact on your environment, but it does! I'm not usually one to question nature, but really - there had to have been a better choice than the mosquito!