Should we kill every mosquito on Earth?

Before you grab that can of bug spray, know this: While some mosquitoes are dangerous to us, not all are. Even those that are sometimes harmful tend not to feed on humans, preferring honeydew, plant sap and nectar, according to Mosquito Joe, a mosquito control company. There are around 3,500 mosquito species, but “only around 100 will potentially bite and spread disease to humans,” Steven Sinkins, a professor in microbiology and tropical medicine at the Centre for Virus Research at the University of Glasgow in Scotland, told Live Science in an email. For instance, Culiseta mosquitoes often bite humans, but are not known to carry any debilitating diseases, while Toxorhynchites, which are common the world over and tend to live in forests, prefer nectar sugars to blood, according to Entomology Today. Therefore, it probably wouldn’t be necessary to get rid of every mosquito species. Instead, we could target the more problematic ones, such as Aedes aegypti, which carry diseases such as yellow fever and Zika. A. aegypti is now ubiquitous, but it wasn’t always this way. The species first spread out of Africa during the slave trade between the 15th and 19th centuries, through trade with Asia in the 18th and 19th centuries, and via troop movements during World War II, according to the World Mosquito Program, a nonprofit based in Australia.

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