For most travelers, camping next to a swamp can be hell. Swarms of mosquitoes buzz on a shady path around your head. They light up in your ears, neck and back. And in a matter of seconds, their jaws tear at your skin, opening a path for the mouths with six needles to sink into their target – your blood. Then comes the itching.
But when dusk falls for Dan Peach, he is the first to offer himself as bait. Last summer, the mosquito researcher spent months hunting for the infamous insect near the countryside swamps, lakes and rivers. At the tops of the mountains, he caught fur mosquitoes. in coastal estuaries, chased the inhabitants of tidal lakes, which can survive and reproduce in water three times the salt content of the ocean. On a recent trip to Whistler, Peach said he went under bridges “like a troll” looking for hidden mosquitoes. It’s all part of an ambitious mapping project that aims to reveal the range of 51 species of mosquitoes already known to exist in BC. From there, Peach will use the maps, combined with predicted changes in temperature and rainfall, to model how mosquitoes and the diseases they carry could spread to the back of a changing climate. “We think these things have already gone further north,” Peach said. “As climate change and some of these conditions shift, where will it be in the future?” But first, you have to catch them. In his lab, Dan Peach shows off part of his mosquito repellent collection in British Columbia. STEFAN LABBY / GLACIER MEDIA In his lab at British Columbia University, Peach pulls out a vacuum cleaner, which looks like an oversized turkey – only, instead of a lamp to suck the drops of sauce, he places the device on his lips and, with a sharp inhale, vacuums broom. a mosquito in a filter inside. Other mosquito hunting devices are even less high-tech. To catch mosquito larvae he uses “a cup on a stick”. “If they float in the water swimming around and see a shadow or something like that, they will dive in and hide,” he said. “So you take this cup on a stick and lean in, as if you were secretly turning them over.” Other times, the researcher will develop a trap that looks like a folding laundry basket with a lid and an opening at the top. The black and white color attracts insects, but also the synthetic sweat made in Germany. The peach opens a cooler door to bring out a half-open package full of a handful of chemicals, each of which is a key ingredient in reproducing the “dirty human smell”. “It just smells like exercise socks,” he says, holding it to the reporter’s nose. In the field, German artificial sweat falls into the carbon dioxide trap, an irresistible mixture as artificially human as Peach can achieve. But there are limits to what a scientist can do – no matter how motivated he is. In many small towns BC, you can not find carbon dioxide. And no matter how much Peach travels across the area, he may not be everywhere at the same time. Instead, Peach hopes an army of civilian scientists will get open palms to help him measure the province’s ever-changing mosquito population – one slap at a time. “We call it ‘Oh! What bit me? ” project, “said Peach, adding that he also welcomes samples from Yukon. “Basically this summer, if you hit the mosquito, put it in an envelope and mail it to us.” Also add the date, as well as the latitude and longitude where he was killed (you can search for it in an app like Google Maps), he says. Once the lab has taken the sample, it will grind it and genetically follow the residue to confirm the species. In return, Peach said he would email information about the species of mosquitoes being slapped. More than a window into what bit you, a slap in the face and a trip to the post office give BC and Yukon residents a helping hand in dealing with future crises.

An undetectable body trail

It is difficult to underestimate the risk that mosquitoes pose to human health. Acting as a carrier for everything from yellow and dengue fever to malaria and Japanese encephalitis, the mosquito has killed humans on an almost unexplored scale. “Mosquitoes are the deadliest animal in the world,” Peach said. Several researchers, including Peach, suspect that malaria alone has killed half the people who ever lived. Or as Bill Gates put it in 2014, mosquitoes kill more people than humans. (At that time, mosquito-borne diseases killed about 725,000 people a year compared to 425,000 people who died at the hands of other people.) Since then, Gates and others have poured huge sums of money into malaria control programs, reducing virus mortality by 36 percent between 2010 and 2020. But by the end of the decade, an estimated 627,000 still died from the disease. And at least 240 million more people are known to have suffered from the disease that year. As one influential book on the deadly traces left by insects put it, “The mosquito remains the destroyer of the worlds and the world’s most prominent and universally distinguished killer of humanity.” “Mosquitoes had this very profound effect on humans,” Peach said. “And since humanity was one thing, basically, and they continue to do it today.” “It simply came to our notice then. “And somehow, we focus on this area and we do not pay much attention to the other things that mosquitoes do in an ecosystem.”

A dangerous vehicle is heading north

Today, one in Eastern Canada could be forgiven for believing that the Lower Mainland BC was always a refuge without mosquitoes. “Sixty years ago, before they left along the Fraser [River] “and drained Lake Sumas. Lower Sterea was considered worse than the Meadows by the settlers who had passed,” Peach said. It was not until the 1960s that the province suffered from mosquito-borne equine encephalitis, and a century ago, the interior had malaria cases. “What exists now has not always been true and may not always be true in the future. “We have to be careful,” Peach said. A recent study, for example, found that the Aedes aegypti mosquito could spread to parts of British Columbia under various global warming emission scenarios. The mosquito species is a carrier of a number of pathogens dangerous to humans, including chikungunya viruses, dengue fever, Japanese encephalitis, Zika, West Nile and yellow fever. Aedes aegypti, a species known to transmit a range of dangerous diseases to humans, is expected to expand in some parts of British Columbia due to climate change. – Dan Pitch There are more than 3,500 species of mosquitoes on the planet. About 80 of them are in Canada. But it is not clear how tiny creatures move. Of the more than 50 species of mosquitoes in BC, a handful are known to be invasive – including the northern house mosquito (Culex pipiens), which carries the West Nile virus, and the Japanese rock mosquito (Aedes japonicus), a species that has been in the countryside for about a decade. The rock lake mosquito, which often bites the forest, is known to carry a number of diseases, including West Nile virus and two forms of encephalitis – brain infections that begin with swelling and headaches and can lead to vomiting, seizures, and vomiting. and in some cases death. But while BC hosts a number of mosquitoes known to transmit disease, its climate is not yet ideal to allow some of the mosquito-borne vectors to follow. This could change in the coming years, as warmer summers and wetter winters extend the range of many species to the north, even to the oceans. “In the last few years, we have seen some of the West Nile carriers in places further north than they were before,” Peach said. Shows Culex pipiens, who recently appeared in Prince George. “He had never thought of going so far north,” he said, noting the strange case in the southern Inland or the Lower Mainland. And while it may be too cold up there for the West Nile to spread into the wild, there is a risk of an infected person carrying the virus with them in a bird-to-human spread that is transmitted through invader bites. Culex pipiens. Mosquitoes are only half the picture. “The climate is definitely limiting the spread of these pathogenic microorganisms,” Peach said. “You need to be warm enough for them to spread.” “There may be areas where there is nothing to worry about right now, but maybe, you know, 40 to 50 years from now, we have to worry about pathogens like the West Nile.”

The invisible role of a killer in sustaining life

Not all mosquitoes kill with pathogens. In fact, only female mosquitoes take blood just to lay their eggs. Many species do not even target humans and only a few carry pathogens that are dangerous to our health. Mosquitoes are as attracted to flowers as humans are. Adult mosquitoes feed on vegetable sugar, bouncing from flower to flower like a bee, in a process that seems to have started at least from the middle of the Cretaceous, over 100 million years ago. In a strange adaptation, mosquitoes take advantage of ants and their habit of breeding aphids to collect honey. As Peach put it in a recent article: “When a mosquito inserts its mouthpiece into an ant’s mouth and caresses the ant’s head with its antennae, it tricks the ant into mixing and sharing its honey.” They also act as a huge food source, a link that drives energy transfer from aquatic environments – where their larvae filter germs, algae and dead leaves out of the water …