I’ll just edit instead!
Bed bugs.
Positive outcome would be no more having to burn contaminted possessions (or wash them in very hot water many times).
I was going to go with the rabies virus, but bedbugs is a solid choice as well.
Viruses are not animals.
Viruses aren’t even alive in the technical biological sense
Right? 🤣
Yeah I think any human-specialized parasite is an easy choice. Head lice? Fuck em.
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I hate to say it, but getting rid of mosquitos would probably have bigger consequences than that. The females are the only ones sucking blood, the males on the other hand help pollinate plants, exterminating them could potentially affect our food production lines…
… But not gonna lie I’d still genocide the fuckers, ecological damage be damned.
You don’t need to eliminate all mosquitos, just the ones that bite people.
There are dozens of different species of mosquitos, and not all of them bite people. If you get rid of the ones that bite people the others will likely still fill in as pollinators for those that are no longer competing with them.
Yes… But then more humans will survive by avoiding certain diseases, which as a result, will produce a worse environmental outcome
Eh, kill off 3 or 4 billionaires per year and you’ll counteract whatever additional environmental damage comes from millions of people not dying from malaria.
Funny you mention that, but in a way that’s also true via the same mechanism.
Isn’t the Gates Foundation focusing on stopping diseases from mosquitos? https://www.worldmosquitoprogram.org/en/news-stories/stories/the-gates-foundation-and-the-world-mosquito-program-partners-in-change
Only the females of a tiny fraction of species, and only when they need to produce eggs, stuck blood.
Minimize their numbers as much as you want, but that won’t stop me from having to deal with them in almost every single day of my life.
I’m off the opinion that no animal would be beneficial to remove. In almost every instance where we have exterminated a species there has been negative unanticipated consequences. Even mosquitos and bed bugs, there are predators that eat them and subsequent predators that eat them and so on. It’s kind of like the butterfly effect. It’s a balance formed from eons of coexistence that is not to be tampered with. There is so many examples where scientists try to introduce an animal to exterminate another that has gone horribly wrong. Regardless of my opinion, all living things have a part in our world. I’m not a vegetarian btw, but I do use Arch.
Mosquitos are also pollinators.
Landlords
They’re not human, I’ll allow this.
You sound just like someone from Nazi Germany.
Yeah, even nazi germany had principled people
Ah yes, the condition of being a landlord, a completely immutable state of being.
Tics. What’s their use in nature anyway?
Definitely mosquitoes.
The bats would miss them.
Any change to the biodiversity on our planet will have a negative effect. What is a pest to you is food for another species, or a pollinator, or any of dozens of valuable purposes.
They’re not just a pest to all humanity, but dogs and other animals as well because they can carry a parasite known as heart worm. I’m sure there are a bunch of other terrible diseases they carry as well.
Bats aren’t solely dependent on mosquitoes either. For all I car they can find something else to eat.
When you’ve seen family members you love suffer from dengue, malaria or whatever other fked up shit they spread, it becomes personal.
Parasitic worms
I haven’t vomited in years, but the concept of those things makes me feel like I’m gonna
Ticks and botflies. We don’t need maggots making a home in our skin. Even worse is what they do to animals like sheep.
Mosquitos are mainly an annoyance to me and I can deal with them.
Maggots are the things that breakdown dead stuff, without them you’d have dead animals and plants rotting on the ground for ages while the bacteria breaks them down slowly. I think the whole world would smell worse.
These are maggots that get laid in your skin specifically. Look up “bot flies”
Fungi do most of the rotting anyway.
You can deal with them?? That would be FANTASTIC. I will pay you.
Whatever shit’s been preserved in the permafrost that’s bound to come back.
None. And we’re hurting badly from the ones that have already been removed.
Pandas. I mean, they really don’t seem like they want to exist in the first place. And China get’s to finally shut up about them.
they really don’t seem like they want to exist
Alternatively, they’re at peace and content with their existence. At least that’s what it seems like to me, goals really
but they cute though
I know you said that we shouldn’t say humans but I’m gonna say it anyway:
Humans.
Sorry.
Would be interesting to tally up the negative impacts of removing humans as well.
Culls of invasive species would no longer occur, which would be detrimental in those ecosystems.
A fairly significant number of endangered animals probably only exist today due to human intervention and breeding programs (i am well aware that we probably made them endangered in the first place)
Cross breeds would be done as well, Ligers and Mules require humans for breeding. Although in fairness they are definitely not natural to begin with.
Many animals we have domesticated would be done for as well, most smaller dogs are completely, reliant on humans for food and grooming. Many cats would be okay, but some breeds are likely dead ends as well. Jersey cows would probably have a bad time as well, without milking, sheep might have issues as well?
Interesting thought experiment.
Good point! Within a few weeks billions of animals would die. Chicken, pigs, cows, cats and dogs.
We definitely need to clarify what “good for the planet” means if we want to decide on the best answer.
Life After people. Whole series exploring this
Ooh, thanks for the suggestion. Seems its on youtube as well. Thanks!
Link for anyone else interested: https://m.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLob1mZcVWOagLL-shJOp-d5_qJOG2MvCJ
Yeah, this is a good topic. I can add a few:
Short term, pets in houses, farm animals, etc will need to escape and start fending for themselves otherwise they’ll starve (or dehydrate).. Oops, I’d somehow missed an entire paragraph of your post 🤦♂️ Sheep need us to trim their wool, because we’ve bred them up grow fair more than they need. They’ll get too hot if they don’t have problems with defecation first (an actual thing farmers have to worry about).Medium to long term, when dams and dikes aren’t maintained they’ll eventually fail, flooding vast areas including the Netherlands.
I guess that the world will continue heating for a bit even once we’re gone, so we wouldn’t be around to theoretically use our tech to help. Obviously, we’re the reason it’s happening in the first place, but nature’s not equipped to deal with change that’s this rapid.
Yes, most of those we created through breeding, but you could argue that wolves and coyotes created modern deer the same way.
I do wonder if many would go extinct in the medium term from predation, before they can evolve fast enough to adapt; I’m thinking farm pigs and chickens would be OK in the short term - they don’t need us to survive - but wild dogs/coyotes/wolves, large cats like the NA lions, raptors, foxes… they’d all be putting a lot of pressure on those mostly defenseless breeds. Pigs are not wild hogs. Cattle and horses exist just fine in their environments without humans. Even with predation, herds are large and they aren’t defenseless.
Sheep are an exception; like you said, they need us to perform maintenance because of how we’ve bred them. Are there others?
My thoughts go to a lot of our stored and operational fuel supplies. Nuclear fuel (both civil and weapon) would eventually become exposed through lack of storage container maintinance and cooling starting meltdown reactions in their localized environments. Oil extraction, distribution, and refining systems are automated to an extent but somewhere a tank is going ng to rupture or just run out of space and then it’s all getting into the environment, likely at sea to have what effects that may cause.
Oh, yeah. If we suddenly disappeared, there’d be so many environmental catastrophes.
I’m sure it’d level off, but a driver falling asleep at the wheel on the highway tends to cause problems. If the BP spill in the Gulf had nobody trying to cap it off who knows how long it’d have kept going.
I’m going to provide one very important reasons it would be disastrous to the ecosystem if humans were suddenly deleted from the Earth: what happens to the many currently active nuclear reactors? And what happens when Chernobyl’s sarcophagus finally corrodes entirely and exposes that radioactive blight to the entirety of Europe and central Asia? Probably nothing good is the answer.
I would be willing to put money on “likely nothing” being the answer for active nuclear reactors. They’re highly automated from a safety perspective these days. I’d be more worried about chemical plants
That’s a good point, too. My general idea was we have certain things we’ve created that we can’t leave unchecked or else it might be disastrous for the environment. Human infrastructure expects humans to exist.
Humans are the only species that would ask a question like this with ecologically damning effects. So, yeah.
Humans are not the problem. Ultrarich people are.
Oh come on, really? Is the problem ultrarich people? Or is the problem poor people who won’t eat those ultrarich people?
I think I’m going to go with Africanized honeybees. My understanding is they’re a man-made calamity, so pressing the delete key on them wouldn’t like, upset the circle of life and piss off Mufasa or whatever.
