or maybe just don’t have stupid grass and plant some natural shit….
grass is unnatural?
most of the time
Many grasses are invasive species in North America, including most popular lawn grasses, so I guess it is in a way? Not sure that that’s what the OP was going for.
it is indeed
Both are important, tall grass is how you find pokemon.
It’s also where you find ticks though. Fee fi fo ficks, I hate ticks!
Gotta catch them all!
In Soviet Russia babushkas plant OGOROD!
Summer is soon. Soon I will be on dacha that has ogorod. Yummy.
So glad I live in a place without many ticks and with no chiggers or other pests in the grass.
I had a friend with a backyard like this. You could see the fleas jumping around.
fleas don’t live in grass
You graze cattle on your yard? Give the insects a break and do a No Mow May.
Is No Mow May actually a thing in the US?
Followed shorty by “angry letter from the health department June”
Followed shorty by “angry letter from the
health departmentHOA June”
Yes, it’s been slowly taking off, but it’s still very niche. People who participate seem to mostly be home gardeners.
If only it would grow like that. My lawn’s natural state is crabgrass and violence
A lot of the US is trying to grow grass that isn’t suited for it’s climate. It’s why it takes so much maintenance. Florida has that problem a lot. Maryland lawns don’t even need watering and the grass is great with little encroachment or weed problems. It’s a bit more varied with dandelions and wild aliums but mostly grass.
It’s a bit more varied with dandelions and wild aliums but mostly grass.
Oh, you mean the biodiversity that nature and birds and turtles and squirrels need? Wish more places didn’t consider a boring green landscape the norm…
Mine always fils up with plantains and fennel plus the dandelions of course
That is either a miniature keyboard or a massive bug
Neither, it’s a tick
Buddy has to bolt his chair back in to drive home too.
Just pre-treat your clothes with permethrin, and spray some lemon-eucalyptus oil on exposed skin, and you’ll be fine. Or you can use picaridin. Really. (A single treatment of permethrin will last about 6 washes. Treat outerwear and socks only, not gloves, hats, underwear, or balaclavas. But DO NOT expose cats to wet permethrin; it is highly toxic to them. They should be fine with treated clothing though.)
If you cut your lawn to ultra short levels and put fuckloads of pesticides on it, then chances are you arent actually USING your lawn anyways. If you actually use your lawn you know its way nicer to have a little wild growth with flowers and shit going on.
I’m very pro natural lawn. But this makes no sense
Tons of families use their textbook lawns for sports, playtime, etc
Maybe thats regional but in my experience living in a couple german cities, “textbook lawn” equals “unused lawn” that purely exist as wealth symbol. Not saying it cant be well kept but there are variying degrees of that.
I guess it’s a regional thing to touch grass
It may be a regional thing to have grass that’s touchable.
Short grass is important for a lot of yard games and more comfortable to lounge on. Wild growth seems nicer to look at and better for the environment but not better if you’re actually using your lawn.
If we could engineer and exterminate all ticks and mosquitos we’d all be so happy.
And dead cuz the food chain would collapse.
Ah yes, of all the species we’ve eradicated, the one that makes up the least biomass would surely be the proverbial straw that breaks the camel’s back.
All I know is that projects like this rarely go as planned. I mean, just ask Australia, they’ve had a couple animal control schemes gone terribly wrong. The truth is that we don’t always know every function of a particular animal within an ecosystem, and messing around with them could have difficult to predict consequences.
Had to ask ChatGPT what relies on ticks and mosquitoes to survive
Species that Rely on Ticks:
Borrelia burgdorferi: The bacterium that causes Lyme disease, which relies on Ixodes ticks (deer ticks) for transmission.
Rickettsia rickettsii: The causative agent of Rocky Mountain spotted fever, transmitted by various tick species.
Babesia: Various species of Babesia rely on ticks for transmission to vertebrate hosts, causing babesiosis.
Species that Rely on Mosquitoes:
Dengue virus: Relies on Aedes mosquitoes (especially Aedes aegypti and Aedes albopictus) for transmission.
Zika virus: Also transmitted primarily by Aedes mosquitoes.
West Nile virus: Transmitted by several species of Culex mosquitoes.
Malaria parasite(Plasmodium spp.): The Plasmodium parasites, such as Plasmodium falciparum, rely on Anopheles mosquitoes for part of their life cycle.
Wuchereria bancrofti: The causative agent of lymphatic filariasis, transmitted by Culex, Anopheles, and Aedes mosquitoes.
Brugia malayi: Another filarial nematode causing lymphatic filariasis, primarily transmitted by Mansonia and Anopheles mosquitoes.
Someone is asking the real questions. The AI answer may be garbage but appreciate the initiative.
Maybe their diet would shift but a lot of animals eat ticks. Frogs and toads, many smaller birds like warblers and probably house sparrows and robins, chickens love them, and of course opposums and mice.
Similar for mosquitos. I see the house sparrows around here catching mosquitos all the time. I’m pretty sure dragon flies feed heavily on them too.
Opossums eat more ticks around where I live than anything. I’m in Virginia so we have all the shitty deer ticks with Lymes. It’s a big problem.
I imagine anyone living where mosquitoes have malaria or any of the other crappy viruses wouldn’t mind them being extinct.
In Australia, ticks are an important apex predator. They keep mammal populations in check so they don’t eat all the food and starve.
Here in Virginia, right outside of DC, and the ticks just give everyone Lymes. They are absolutely fucking everywhere too and it gets worse each year.
They’re meant to help keep the politician population in check.
Fill the swamp!?
Mosquitos are pollinators.
Not all mosquitoes bite humans. If you exterminated the biting ones, the non-biting ones would just fill that same ecological niche.
Mosquitoes are the only natural predators of humans. If you mess with the delicate ecosystem, humans will procreate uninhibited and exhaust their resources, leading to a far worse fate. It’s kinder to just leave the mosquitoes be, and let nature run its course.
The males don’t bite, but the females need that sweet protein from blood to grow the next generation. Exterminating all the females (the biting ones) would end the whole population.
The non-biting variety are called “blind mosquitoes” or “midges”. Their females don’t suck blood.
Not cosmopolitan mosquitoes
Not every species are beneficial. There are only a handful that bite us and don’t really contribute to the ecosystem. Those are the ones we need to get rid of.
I think you’d have to define beneficial… Any species with sufficient biomass will become part of the surrounding ecology, with several other species adapting over time to predate upon that biomass.
Both tics and mosquitoes are huge sources of food for animals like birds, bats, fish, amphibians, and especially other insects. Completely destroying them would likely lead to an ecological disaster, just as it does when humans attempt to sanitize any aspect of nature.
The sanitizing process of urbanization is one of the largest reasons mosquito populations have exploded in North America in the last hundred years in the first place. Instead of mosquitoes laying eggs in ponds and waterways that are filled with frogs and fish that normally control their population. They are laying their eggs in urban environments that the animals who normally govern their population cannot thrive.
Idk man, I’ve lived in a tiny remote village of only a couple hundred people with no water, electricity, plumbing or roads and mosquitos would go insanely hard during the summer. It was the village my mother and grandmother grew up in and I had the privilege to experience it for a couple years. It sucked.
I’ve seen those nat geo docs in Africa as well of remote villages where they trap mosquitos yearly during the swarm and make parties out of them to eat.
Small sample size but I don’t think urbanizing is helping them explode in numbers. It is killing their predators though, you’re right but it’s also killing them.
There have always been areas with large populations of mosquitoes, especially in warm wet climates around the equator. However in the last hundred years they have been utilizing urbanization to spread further north and south, mainly because cities lack biodiversity and have offer almost unlimited food Sources
Nobody wants to exterminate all mosquitoes. Just the ones that bite humans.
I don’t think that specificality really affects the argument. Any effort to reduce a significant amount of biomass is going to have untold amounts of consequences on an ecological scale.
Whether that’s beneficial or not depends on who you’re talking about.
Relevant rabbit holes for the lazy:
We don’t understand the intricacies of any ecosystem nearly enough to start engineering it. Pull one thread, and you might unravel the tapestry.
We wipe out thousands of species every year through pollution alone, what’s one more to add to the pile?
- Ticks, mosquitoes, … aren’t just one species.
- The species that go extinct are mostly local ones that don’t have large numbers to begin with. While one individual mosquito is insignificant to a ridiculous degree, mosquitoes as a whole, even just one species, play a much bigger role than the Northern Fuckwitted Summerbunny of East Whateverstan could ever do.
If the earth is beyond saving and we’re all going to die from heat anyway, I’m all for exterinating all the mosquitos so we can enjoy them being dead for a little bit.
My republican friend would suggest that you should have trans folk read to them and then they’ll turn gay. No way to reproduce then.
Why would you be friends with such an individual
I’m in my early 40s and politics wasn’t a thing we really talked about much until Trump came around. Now it’s a shit show. I’ve even voted Republican several times before although not for a decade at this point now.
Sounds like they have some nasty views irrespective of politics. Treating gay and trans people like people has nothing to do with politics.
We’re a similar age. I’ve let go of people who voiced these views a long time ago. It’s not that our politics don’t align, it’s the fact that they’re an ignorant, offensive piece of shit… And I’m not.
He actually doesn’t have any problem with gay people. I know this because my brother is gay.
His main schtick with trans people is that he thinks kids shouldn’t be allowed to undergo surgery since their minds aren’t fully developed.
He is a big Tim Pool fan and I have a feeling that a lot of his bullshit is just echoing the beanie man.
Haha you’re not really selling me on him, but I’m not telling you who to be friends with. But you know, the company you keep…
Wait, you can keep companies?
steals Google
Once Trump is gone the spell will be lifted, maybe
From my stint working in a rural health department… there’s a lot of motherfuckers with backyards like this.
Only thing missing is a firepit with metal and plastic debris in it.
The car seat in the grass just brings it together.
I’m up to 5 ticks already this year
Last time i got one was like 7 or 8 years ago
Same here, but I’m cheating. I moved to where ticks don’t live.
We have some fescue mixed with invasive Bermuda grass. You can’t stop the Bermuda grass. It gets into everything. I fought it for years but finally just gave up.
Lyme juice is getting more popular i hear
