The Mosquito Read online

  ALSO BY TIMOTHY C. WINEGARD

  The First World Oil War

  For King and Kanata: Canadian Indians and the First World War

  Indigenous Peoples of the British Dominions and the First World War

  Oka: A Convergence of Cultures and the Canadian Forces

  An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

  www.penguinrandomhouse.com

  Copyright © 2019 by Timothy C. Winegard

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  Title page art © U.S. National Library of Medicine

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Names: Winegard, Timothy C. (Timothy Charles), 1977– author.

  Title: The mosquito : a human history of our deadliest predator / Timothy C. Winegard.

  Description: New York : Dutton, [2019] | Includes bibliographical references and index.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2019005477 | ISBN 9781524743413 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781524743437 (ebook) | ISBN 9781524745508 (export)

  Subjects: LCSH: Mosquitoes—Ecology—History. | Human ecology.

  Classification: LCC QL536 .W56 2019 | DDC 595.77/2—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019005477

  While the author has made every effort to provide accurate telephone numbers, internet addresses, and other contact information at the time of publication, neither the publisher nor the author assumes any responsibility for errors or for changes that occur after publication. Further, the publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  Version_2

  To my parents, Charles and Marian, who filled my formative years with knowledge, travel, curiosity, and love

  Contents

  Also by Timothy C. Winegard

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Introduction

  CHAPTER 1

  Toxic Twins: The Mosquito and Her Diseases

  CHAPTER 2

  Survival of the Fittest: Fever Demons, Footballs, and Sickle Cell Safeties

  CHAPTER 3

  General Anopheles: From Athens to Alexander

  CHAPTER 4

  Mosquito Legions: The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire

  CHAPTER 5

  Unrepentant Mosquitoes: A Crisis of Faiths and the Crusades

  CHAPTER 6

  Mosquito Hordes: Genghis Khan and the Mongol Empire

  CHAPTER 7

  The Columbian Exchange: Mosquitoes and the Global Village

  CHAPTER 8

  Accidental Conquerors: African Slavery and the Mosquito’s Annexation of the Americas

  CHAPTER 9

  The Seasoning: Mosquito Landscapes, Mythology, and the Seeds of America

  CHAPTER 10

  Rogues in a Nation: The Mosquito and the Creation of Greater Britain

  CHAPTER 11

  The Crucible of Disease: Colonial Wars and a New World Order

  CHAPTER 12

  Unalienable Bites: The American Revolution

  CHAPTER 13

  Mercenary Mosquitoes: Wars of Liberation and the Making of the Americas

  CHAPTER 14

  Mosquitoes of Manifest Destiny: Cotton, Slavery, Mexico, and the American South

  CHAPTER 15

  Sinister Angels of Our Nature: The American Civil War

  CHAPTER 16

  Unmasking the Mosquito: Disease and Imperialism

  CHAPTER 17

  This Is Ann: She’s Dying to Meet You: The Second World War, Dr. Seuss, and DDT

  CHAPTER 18

  Silent Springs and Superbugs: The Mosquito Renaissance

  CHAPTER 19

  The Modern Mosquito and Her Diseases: At the Gates of Extinction?

  Conclusion

  Acknowledgments

  Selected Bibliography

  Notes

  Index

  About the Author

  Introduction

  We are at war with the mosquito.

  A swarming and consuming army of 110 trillion enemy mosquitoes patrols every inch of the globe save Antarctica, Iceland, the Seychelles, and a handful of French Polynesian micro-islands. The biting female warriors of this droning insect population are armed with at least fifteen lethal and debilitating biological weapons against our 7.7 billion humans deploying suspect and often self-detrimental defensive capabilities. In fact, our defense budget for personal shields, sprays, and other deterrents to stymie her unrelenting raids has a rapidly rising annual revenue of $11 billion. And yet, her deadly offensive campaigns and crimes against humanity continue with reckless abandon. While our counterattacks are reducing the number of annual casualties she perpetrates, the mosquito remains the deadliest hunter of human beings on the planet. Last year she slaughtered only 830,000 people. We sensible and wise Homo sapiens occupied the runner-up #2 spot, slaying 580,000 of our own species.

  The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which has contributed nearly $4 billion to mosquito research since its creation in 2000, releases an annual report that identifies the animals most lethal to humans. The contest is not even close. The heavyweight champion, and our apex predator in perpetuity, is the mosquito. Since 2000, the annual average number of human deaths caused by the mosquito has hovered around 2 million. We come in a distant second at 475,000, followed by snakes (50,000), dogs and sand flies (25,000 each), the tsetse fly, and the assassin or kissing bug (10,000 each). The fierce killers of lore and Hollywood celebrity appear much further down our list. The crocodile is ranked #10 with 1,000 annual deaths. Next on the list are hippos with 500, and elephants and lions with 100 fatalities each. The much-slandered shark and wolf share the #15 position, killing an average of ten people per annum.*

  The mosquito has killed more people than any other cause of death in human history. Statistical extrapolation situates mosquito-inflicted deaths approaching half of all humans that have ever lived. In plain numbers, the mosquito has dispatched an estimated 52 billion people from a total of 108 billion throughout our relatively brief 200,000-year existence.*

  Yet, the mosquito does not directly harm anyone. It is the toxic and highly evolved diseases she transmits that cause an endless barrage of desolation and death. Without her, however, these sinister pathogens could not be transferred or vectored to humans nor continue their cyclical contagion. In fact, without her, these diseases would not exist at all. You cannot have one without the other. The nefarious mosquito, roughly the size and weight of a grape seed, would be as innocuous as a generic ant or housefly and you would not be reading this book. After all, her dominion of death would be erased from the historical record and I would have no wild and remarkable tales to tell. Imagine for a moment a world without deadly mosquitoes or any mosquitoes for that matter? Our history and the world we know, or think we know, would be completely unrecognizable. We might as well live on a foreign planet in a galaxy far, far away.

  As the pinnacle purveyor of our extermination, the mosquito has consistently been at the front lines of history as the grim reaper, the harvester of human populations, and the ultimate agent o
f historical change. She has played a greater role in shaping our story than any other animal with which we share our global village. Within these bloody and disease-plagued pages, you will embark on a chronological mosquito-tormented journey through our tangled communal history. Karl Marx recognized in 1852 that “men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please.” It was the steadfast and insatiable mosquito that manipulated and determined our destiny. “It is perhaps a rude blow to the amour propre of our species,” writes acclaimed University of Georgetown history professor J. R. McNeill, “to think that lowly mosquitoes and mindless viruses can shape our international affairs. But they can.” We tend to forget that history is not the artifact of inevitability.

  A common theme throughout this story is the interplay between war, politics, travel, trade, and the changing patterns of human land use and natural climate. The mosquito does not exist in a vacuum, and her global ascendancy was created by corresponding historical events both naturally and socially induced. Our relatively short human journey from our first steps in and out of Africa to our global historical trails is the result of a coevolutionary marriage between society and nature. We as humans have played a large role in the transmission of mosquito-borne diseases through population migrations (involuntary or otherwise), densities, and pressures. Historically, our domestication of plants and animals (which are reservoirs of disease), advancements in agriculture, deforestation, climate change (natural and artificially encouraged), and global war, trade, and travel have all played a part in nurturing the ideal ecologies for the proliferation of mosquito-borne illnesses.

  Historians, journalists, and modern memories, however, find pestilence and disease rather dull, when compared to war, conquest, and national supermen, most often legendary military leaders. The literary record has been tainted by attributing the fates of empires and nations, the outcome of pivotal wars, and the bending of historical events to individual rulers, to specific generals, or to the larger concerns of human agencies such as politics, religion, and economics. The mosquito has been written off as a sidelined spectator, rather than an active agent within the ongoing processes of civilization. In doing so, she has been defamed by this slanderous exclusion of her enduring influence and impact in changing the course of history. Mosquitoes and her diseases that have accompanied traders, travelers, soldiers, and settlers around the world have been far more lethal than any man-made weapons or inventions. The mosquito has ambushed humankind with unmitigated fury since time immemorial and scratched her indelible mark on the modern world order.

  Mercenary mosquitoes mustered armies of pestilence and stalked battlefields across the globe, often deciding the outcome of game-changing wars. Time and time again, the mosquito laid waste to the greatest armies of her generations. To borrow from acclaimed author Jared Diamond, the endless shelves of military history books and Hollywood fanfare lionizing famed generals distort the ego-deflating truth: Mosquito-borne disease proved far deadlier than manpower, materials, or the minds of the most brilliant generals. It is worth remembering, as we navigate the trenches and tour historic theaters of war, that a sick soldier is more taxing to the military machine than a dead one. Not only do they need to be replaced but they also continue to consume valuable resources. During our warring existence, mosquito-borne diseases have been prolific battlefield burdens and killers.

  Our immune systems are finely tuned to our local environments. Our curiosity, greed, invention, arrogance, and blatant aggression thrust germs into the global whirlwind of historical events. Mosquitoes do not respect international borders—walls or no walls. Marching armies, inquisitive explorers, and land-hungry colonists (and their African slaves) brought new diseases to distant lands, but, on the other hand, were also brought to their knees by the microorganisms in the foreign lands they intended to conquer. As the mosquito transformed the landscapes of civilization, humans were unwittingly required to respond to her piercing universal projection of power. After all, the biting truth is that more than any other external participant, the mosquito, as our deadliest predator, drove the events of human history to create our present reality.

  I think I can safely say that most of you reading this book have one thing in common—a genuine hatred for mosquitoes. Bashing mosquitoes is a universal pastime and has been since the dawn of humanity. Across the ages, from our hominid ancestral evolution in Africa to the present day, we have been locked in an unsurpassed life-or-death struggle for survival with the not-so-simple mosquito. In this lopsided battle and unequal balance of power, historically, we did not stand a chance. Through evolutionary adaptation, our dogged and deadly archnemesis has repeatedly circumvented our efforts of extermination to continue her feverish uninterrupted feeding and her undefeated reign of terror. The mosquito remains the destroyer of worlds and the preeminent and globally distinguished killer of humankind.

  Our war with the mosquito is the war of our world.

  CHAPTER 1

  Toxic Twins: The Mosquito and Her Diseases

  It has been one of the most universally recognizable and aggravating sounds on earth for 190 million years—the humming buzz of a mosquito. After a long day of hiking while camping with your family or friends, you quickly shower, settle into your lawn chair, crack an ice-cold beer, and exhale a deep, contented sigh. Before you can enjoy your first satisfying swig, however, you hear that all-too-familiar sound signaling the ambitious approach of your soon-to-be tormentors.

  It is nearing dusk, her favorite time to feed. Although you heard her droning arrival, she gently lands on your ankle without detection, as she usually bites close to the ground. It’s always a female, by the way. She conducts a tender, probing, ten-second reconnaissance, looking for a prime blood vessel. With her backside in the air, she steadies her crosshairs and zeros in with six sophisticated needles. She inserts two serrated mandible cutting blades (much like an electric carving knife with two blades shifting back and forth), and saws into your skin, while two other retractors open a passage for the proboscis, a hypodermic syringe that emerges from its protective sheath. With this straw she starts to suck 3–5 milligrams of your blood, immediately excreting its water, while condensing its 20% protein content. All the while, a sixth needle is pumping in saliva that contains an anticoagulant preventing your blood from clotting at the puncture site.* This shortens her feeding time, lessening the likelihood that you feel her penetration and splat her across your ankle.* The anticoagulant causes an allergic reaction, leaving an itchy bump as her parting gift. The mosquito bite is an intricate and innovative feeding ritual required for reproduction. She needs your blood to grow and mature her eggs.*

  Please don’t feel singled out, special, or view yourself as a chosen one. She bites everyone. This is just the inherent nature of the beast. There is absolutely no truth to the persistent myths that mosquitoes fancy females over males, that they prefer blondes and redheads over those with darker hair, or that the darker or more leathery your skin, the safer you are from her bite. It is true, however, that she does play favorites and feasts on some more than others.

  Blood type O seems to be the vintage of choice over types A and B or their blend. People with blood type O get bitten twice as often as those with type A, with type B falling somewhere in between. Disney/Pixar must have done their homework when portraying a tipsy mosquito ordering a “Bloody Mary, O-Positive” in the 1998 movie A Bug’s Life. Those who have higher natural levels of certain chemicals in their skin, particularly lactic acid, also seem to be more attractive. From these elements she can analyze which blood type you are. These are the same chemicals that determine an individual’s level of skin bacteria and unique body odor. While you may offend others and perhaps yourself, in this case being pungently rancid is a good thing, for it increases bacterial levels on the skin, which makes you less alluring to mosquitoes. Cleanliness is not next to godliness, except for stinky feet, which emit a bacterium (the same one that ripens and rinds certain chee
ses) that is a mosquito aphrodisiac. Mosquitoes are also enticed by deodorants, perfumes, soap, and other applied fragrances.

  While this may seem unfair to many of you, and the reason remains a mystery, she also has an affinity for beer drinkers. Wearing bright colors is also not a wise choice, since she hunts by both sight and smell—the latter depending chiefly on the amount of carbon dioxide exhaled by the potential target. So all your thrashing and huffing and puffing only magnetizes mosquitoes and puts you at greater risk. She can smell carbon dioxide from over 200 feet away. When you exercise, for example, you emit more carbon dioxide through both frequency of breath and output. You also sweat, releasing those appetizing chemicals, primarily lactic acid, that invite the mosquito’s attention. Lastly, your body temperature rises, which is an easily identifiable heat signature for your soon-to-be tormentor. On average, pregnant women suffer twice as many bites, as they respire 20% more carbon dioxide, and have a marginally elevated body temperature. As we will see, this is bad news for the mother and the fetus when it comes to infection from Zika and malaria.

  Please don’t go on a shower, deodorant, and exercise strike or shelve your beloved beer and bright T-shirts just yet. Unfortunately, 85% of what makes you attractive to mosquitoes is prewired in your genetic circuit board, whether that be blood type; natural chemical, bacteria, or CO2 levels; metabolism; or stink and stench. At the end of the day, she will find blood from any exposed target of opportunity.

  Unlike their female counterparts, male mosquitoes do not bite. Their world revolves around two things: nectar and sex. Like other flying insects, when ready to mate, male mosquitoes assemble over a prominent feature, ranging from chimneys to antennas to trees to people. Many of us grumble and flail in frustration as that dogged cloud of bugs droning over our heads shadows us when we walk and refuses to disperse. You are not paranoid, nor are you imagining this phenomenon. Take it as a compliment. Male mosquitoes have graced you with the honor of being a “swarm marker.” Mosquito swarms have been photographed extending 1,000 feet into the air, resembling a tornado funnel cloud. With the cocksure males stubbornly assembled over your head, females will fly into their horde to find a suitable mate. While males will mate frequently in a lifetime, one dose of sperm is all the female needs to produce numerous batches of offspring. She stores the sperm and dispenses them piecemeal for each separate birthing of eggs. Her short moment of passion has provided one of the two necessary components for procreation. The only ingredient missing is your blood.