10 August 2019 | New Scientist | 31Book
The Mosquito:
A human history of
our deadliest predator
Timothy C. Winegard
Allen Lane
HOW many summers have been
made excruciating by the whine
of mosquitoes? Sleepless nights,
frantic scratching and painful
swellings – no wonder mosquito
hieroglyphs were included in
Egyptian curses, and Assyrians
and Babylonians had devil gods
associated with buzzing insects.
But this is as nothing compared
with the death and destruction
wrought by humanity’s greatest
predator, an insect that can drink
three times its body weight of blood
in one meal and collectively kill
more people than any weapon.
Five hundred people a year die
from attacks by hippopotamuses,
crocodiles claim a thousand, and
25,000 are killed by dogs. But
mosquitoes kill hundreds of
thousands annually through malaria.
Collectively, mosquitoes transmit
15 diseases, including five forms
of malaria, yellow fever, zika and
West Nile virus, and elephantiasis-
producing worms. This is despite us
having the chemicals to help keep
such scourges at bay.
In the past, these weren't
available. Of the 100 billion or so
Homo sapiens who ever lived, half
may have been killed by malaria.
With the sheer Malthusian impact
of malaria established early in
The Mosquito, its author Timothy
Winegard, a professor of history
at Colorado Mesa University,
shows how much of the human
story was shaped by the mosquito.
Forget generals and armies,
politicians and plots – in much of
the world, at some time or other,
people were just too enervated
by the fevers of malaria to make
history. The list of malaria's military
victories is long, from centuries of
defeating attacks on Rome to the
faltering of Kublai Khan’s invasion
of the Khmer civilisation, through
the Crusades and the glacial
progress of British Imperial forces
in Southern Africa, to more recent
conflicts such as the Vietnam war.
Then there are historical figures
whose careers were brought to
a febrile close. Tutankhamun,
Alexander the Great and Ghengis
Khan are among the famous
dead that Winegard documents,
along with an unsung 95 million
indigenous people in Central
and South America who died
after European colonists brought
malarial mosquitoes with them.
The historical reach of malaria
is with us still and makes for some
strange connections. For example,
what is the link between the
domestication of the yam some
8000 years ago and the annualunavailability of some American
football players for games at Denver
Broncos’s stadium? (Spoiler alert,
sickle-cell anaemia is involved.)
There is no end of fascinating
details: elephants wrinkle their skin
to crush mosquitoes; young reindeer
get bitten 9000 times a minute
in peak season; and the word
“abracadabra” was used by early
Christians on anti-malarial amulets.
It is all written with great brio,
allowing readers to relish the
connections between the collapse
of societies, the failure of grand
invasion plans and the rise and
demise of insecticide DDT, while
keeping the sheer destructive
power of the tiny creature in mind.
Winegard’s final chapters
deal with the likely responses of
Aedes and Anopheles mosquitoes
to the changing climate. To animals
that began by parasitising dinosaurs
and then jumped to birds and
mammals, the warmer future
looks rosy indeed. ❚Adrian Barnett is a rainforest
ecologist at Brazil’s National Institute
of Amazonian Research in ManausThe mosquito can drink up
to 5 milligrams of human
blood in a single meal PERNSANITFOTO/GETTY
How mozzies made us
From Roman sieges to the Vietnam war, mosquitoes have shaped
human history more than any weapon, finds Adrian Barnett
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