Dr. Culler’s work focuses on how the arctic’s rapidly warming climate, affects mosquitoes and by extension caribou and people. Before climate change, mosquitoes hatched in late May, begin biting in late June, and were all gone by late July. But with climate change there’s much more variability...
“They’re aggressive because they’re desperate,” says Lauren Culler an ecologist with Dartmouth’s Institute of Arctic Studies who researches Greenland’s mosquitoes. “My research here,” says Culler, “has found that only 12-15 percent of mosquitoes ever get a blood meal.”
Female mosquitoes (only female mosquitoes bite) require a blood meal to lay eggs, and here in Greenland blood meals are limited primarily to caribou (also known as Greenlandic reindeer), musk ox, and sweet blooded visitors from New York City. They’re aggressive enough that they can kill caribou calves.
Although we typically associate mosquitoes with warmer climates, the Arctic, except for Iceland which is a bit of an ecological mystery, has fierce, fat, and abundant mosquitoes. Culler and I are in Kangerlussuaq, a dusty inland town of roughly 500 people in Western Greenland, to check out her mosquito ponds, the shallow pools of water where mosquitoes spend three quarter of their lives. Mosquitoes are laid in ponds as eggs, hatch as larva, and pupate or transform from wriggling larva into flying mosquito, at the ponds’ drying margins…
