Food chain collapse happening elsewhere is a reason not to risk creating more of it. It makes ecosystems more fragile, not less.

> If your alien species were unable to identify wheat as an important food source, one would question how they managed to figure out interstellar travel.

Per your prior point: we are causing food chain collapse all over the globe. We are not an alien species with a good track record on this.

> "we don't know what might happen" (a statement of the unintended consequences of science meddling with nature that goes back in fiction to at least Mary Shelley)

Per your prior point: the unintended consequences of science meddling with nature also goes back in reality to the widespread food chain collapse that our science is already unintentionally causing all over the globe.

The following two arguments are not ones that I've made, and aren't necessary to justify extreme caution.

> And these are the arguments that condemn a million people a year to death.

Obviously the people arguing against you believe there's a chance that altering course would be far, far worse than this already-not-good outcome.

> I would be easily swayed by evidence of large-scale ecosystem destabilization if Anopheles were eradicated. To date, not only is there no such evidence, but there is some evidence to the contrary (species of mosquito have been introduced to island habitats where they went on to have significant effects on local animal populations).

Yes I'm in the same boat as you. But note that this is a fundamentally different position than "other things eat things that humans call 'mosquitos' so it should be fine."

> Food chain collapse happening elsewhere is a reason not to risk creating more of it.

Granted, but also food chain collapse has been happening for a while now and yet Anopheles is still not anything's preferred food source. It really seems to fit the definition of a strictly non-beneficial parasite.

> ...science meddling with nature also goes back in reality to the widespread food chain collapse that our science is already unintentionally causing all over the globe.

There's a whiff of "science causes bad things" here, which is what I keep hoping isn't the unstated foundation of the pro-mosquito argument.

> > And these are the arguments that condemn a million people a year to death.

> Obviously the people arguing against you believe there's a chance that altering course would be far, far worse than this already-not-good outcome.

I seriously, seriously doubt the people making this argument have thought all that hard about this. The more likely scenario is that the millionish dead per year is happening in other people's countries and therefore it's not thought about at all.

I wonder what the factor-of-10 scale would be for the number of Zika-affected births in the US before Americans suddenly became overwhelmingly in favor of eradicating these mosquito species. 100? 1,000? 10,000? Over-under at 10,000, I guess?

I don't think I got much in the way of any new insight to how other people think about this, but thanks for the discussion, anyway.