So if you can CRISPR an infertile mosquito and half of the worlds mosquitoes literally screw themselves into extinction you will have eliminated a lot of malaria. You will also have eliminated a lot of bird food. How many humans will live? How many birds will die? If you knew the answer to that question and network searched all of the ecospherically related questions, you might end up with something that ends up counting all sorts of animals of particular interest. The trick of course is to simulate an entire ecosystem, and having done so with a complex enough model, reduce the number of unintended consequences, or at least recognize some of them in realtime for the next iteration of the model.
The biggest problem with this will be scaling moments. What happens with the death of 20 billion mosquitoes may be a completely different phenomenon than what happens with the death of a mere 2 million. This is a field of endeavor that I imagine. Look how primitive putting a wristband on the leg of a condor is compared to this.
I cannot see that the ethics of this are any more significant than the ethics of farming. Farming is certainly exactly that same thing - ecosystem engineering, in which the DNA and destiny of any number of organic species is manipulated and subordinated in a controlled manner to yield benefits specifically for the dietary requirements of humans. You control the territory. Map off a piece of the earth and subject it to human science, technology and other fiddling.
I recall some research done a long time about about wolf populations somewhere in the colder bits of Canada. At the time people could not believe that these arctic wolves could survive without eating livestock, and so farmers were shooting them. Only one researcher was brave enough to hang out at those latitudes away from supermarkets for months to study these wolves. As he came close to starving, he found himself regularly dining on roasted rats, and suddenly it became clear that large mammals could survive indefinitely on such a diet - which nobody believed before his documentation. Since then this has always been a part of my thinking and threw a great number of monster movies under the relentless logical bus in my mind. How can anything so huge survive to be strong enough to knock down buildings if all they are going to eat is a tiny human or two?
These are the matters of caloric thermodynamics to be considered. It takes energy, and these paths of energy are what should be measurable to enable such tracking of ecosystem dynamics. I don't know what shortcuts are taken in the supercomputing simulation of nuclear detonations, but there is a clue in there somewhere.
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