Mosquitoes discovered in Iceland for the first time | Hacker News Reader

Mosquitoes discovered in Iceland for the first time

cnn.com

189 pointsbreve104 comments

I am surprised that I should be surprised. Aren't mosquitoes a well known nuisance in Greenland, which despite the name is colder than Iceland? I would have expected that mosquitos in Iceland were also entirely normal. TIL.

Greenland is pretty close to the main body of North America, they would only need to traverse 30 miles of water to get there. Whereas Iceland is about 200 miles from the closest point in Greenland.

Not sure Ellesmere Island counts as part of the main body of NA. If you exclude the Northern edge of Greenland, which also the most hostile I would assume, Greenland is about as close to NA as to Iceland.

Actually there’s a land border between Canada and Greenland.

This travel blog was posted a bit ago on HN [0]. Much of the nature of Greenland was a shock for me to learn about, including the severe mosquitos.

[0] https://matduggan.com/greenland-is-a-beautiful-nightmare/

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45396754

Midges and mosquitos are different things. And biting midges have only been in Iceland for 10 years or so.

https://www.icelandreview.com/news/iceland-marks-ten-years-o...

Siberia is also known to have just extremely brutal mosquito seasons. Turns out even -40C isn't enough to do away with the little persistent blood suckers.

And Alaska.

Nothing killed my dream of a private island in Alaska quite so fast as elephant mosquitoes[0]

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toxorhynchites_rutilus

The wikipedia article you linked to says that the adults of that species feed only on nectar and do not suck blood.

... and have a range largely in the south-eastern United States.

Which isn't quite where Alaska is located.

Good point. I wonder if they'd heard about huge mosquitoes up north and just looked for first wikipedia article about large mosquitoes.

Maybe they were thinking of this one. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culiseta_alaskaensis

This one had a large size and was a blood sucker, but wrong side of the continent again. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psorophora_ciliata

Honestly, I was so confident in what I thought I knew (namely evil giant Alaskan mosquitoes) that I didn’t bother to read the article I linked, I just added it for others’ context. Culiseta alaskaensis is probably the source of confusion, and I think a switch-up happened when this was first relayed to me. Looks like the island might be back on, assuming it doesn’t get hot enough to become temperate in the next few years hah.

>Tx. rutilus feeding behaviors make them strikingly different from a typical mosquito. Both adult males and females are strictly nectar-feeding and so they do not have a role in the transmission of pathogens to animals as in other mosquitoes.[7] Instead, their larvae are predacious and could potentially help curb the spread of diseases via vector mosquitoes. While they commonly prey on copepods, rotifers, ostracods, and chironomids, they also generally have a preference for certain species of mosquito larvae including common disease vectors such as Aedes albopictus, Aedes aegypti, and Aedes polynesiensis.

what's the issue?

In my experience Black flies[1] and no-see-ums[2] are far worse (not counting mosquitoes born disease). It's like a massive angry cloud of micro horseflies that intend to dismember you bite by bite.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_fly [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ceratopogonidae

FWIW black flies are also disease carriers.

Yeah, they can, I was just commenting on the physical experience as to which insects would keep me away from the northern latitudes.

While technically true, I think that's in tropical Africa. Are there also diseases that they carry in North America? Even without disease, I tend to agree with the OP that black flies are worse than mosquitoes, and don't think I've ever heard of anyone getting a disease from a black fly bite in the US or Canada.

You're mostly correct, but apparently not totally :) - I did think that it was further north, but the human cases are usually only in south and central america and africa. Nonetheless, there are some.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4809994/ (human cases in the US - but is primarily in animals)

https://www.merckvetmanual.com/poultry/bloodborne-organisms-... (birds only, but still north american disease)

There's also an allergic reaction apparently due to large numbers of bites called simuliotoxicosis / black fly fever.

There's also this mysterious one in europe. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7920075/

Aaaand there's this site claiming possible encephalitis transmission, although I kinda feel I'd prefer a better cite than that. https://www.mosquitomagnet.com/resources/faq-black-fly-other...

The Blackfly song has it right then? Thank you National Film Board of Canada: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f389hIxZAOc

Pretty much - although after living with it for 4 year I can report it's often worse. =) The local bookstore gave a discount for the first bite of the season if you lived long enough to collect.

From what I know, Siberia's mosquitoes are even more brutal than those in the more temperate regions of Russia, and there are far more of them. Iceland's lack of mosquitoes doesn't seem to be due to the cold itself; something else must be at play. Iceland's average winter temperate is around -1C.

Much shorter breeding season so maybe evolutionary selection made them even more aggressive than the typical US swamp mosquito. The worst I've ever encountered here in Texas some kind of deer fly, and they're tough and bloodthirstily agressive. I have backhanded them 20ft and they come back for more.

Not surprising at all to me after several summer trips to interior Alaska. The mosquitoes are so thick that you inhale them sometimes; which is so disgusting. I slathered myself in Deet (the only thing that works) and was mostly ok. Even then they find every square mm that you missed. I sat down for 30 minutes on a bench leaning forward talking to some people. My shirt pulled up about 1/2” (12mm). Later I counted 137 bites (some had merged due to swelling) across that strip of exposed flesh!

Interior British Columbia sounds similar. I used to work in the forest and they were so persistent, invasive, and aggressive. You had to just stop caring because they were relentless and virtually unstoppable. They'd end up in your clothing, in your hair, your nose, mouth... Sometimes the itch was so severe it burned.

I don't miss that. It usually peaked and calmed down with the season, but if it was warm enough they were always around.

I've read that there are tribes who spent a month or more at the peak of biting insect season hiding in their tents and filling them with smoke. The bugs swarm so thickly that they can kill cows. Not by biting them to death, but by clogging their nostrils until the cow suffocates.

Iceland does have a lot of gnats, midges, flies etc. that are just as big a nusance.

Likely human introduction. Far from being an isolated case: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-025-64446-3

Dup: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45675851 (56 comments)

Iceland doesn't have "extreme cold". It does go below freezing in the winter, though, and it's relatively isolated.

Calgary has a few weeks of -30C every winter, and we are not short on mosquitoes.

And calgary is southern alberta, closer to the US border than it is to northern canada. Fort McMurray and areas north regularly get -40 weeks and still have loads of bugs come summer.

(Being so far from any coast, the northern canadian praries often trade turns with inner siberia for the coldest place on earth during winter. The north pole is kept "warm" by the sea.)

I'm surprised that happened this year, with all those ships and travel. Mosquitos couldn't grasp hiding on cargo ships until now?

Could also be that mosquitos always managed to hitch a ride, but in so small numbers that they disappeared relatively quickly once they arrived, or it simply was too cold but some always appeared.

But now when it's a bit warmer, the same amount arrives but more survive.

Also, more time for succeeding populations to have mutations that have better adapted to even the colder climate.

In order to produce a breeding population, several mosquitoes need to hitch a ride on the same ship and stay close enough together that they can mate after arriving. They also need to survive the trip over without that much food. I imagine its quite unlikely.

Strong disagree. One auto tire with a few cups of stagnant water can easily have dozens of larvae.

On an entire ship? Probably hundreds of dozens.

Birds can carry insects or their eggs all over the place too.

I never imagined that they could survive in Alaska. From the show Life below zero... take a look at these.....https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YXq92PItsA0

Shocking considering how cold it gets there. It's cold and dry and windy where I live, and there are nearly zero skeeters. I spend most of my afternoons on the porch, and I've been bit twice all summer. But this tracks with what I've heard from campers and hikers in that region. You wake up and your tent is covered in the little bastards.

I've read that migrating herds change their course from year to year to avoid the recently hatched swarms of mosquitoes.

I have a magnet that's a mosquito with text "Alaska state bird".

Nosquitos themselves can't survive when it goes below freezing, but sadly their eggs are nearly indestructible. Siberia, Alaska and the northern parts of the Nordics are absolutely plagued with them in the summer, since snowmelt creates huge amounts of stagnant water that melts the eggs in a perfect habitat for breeding.

What's the average life span of mosquitoes? Assuming the climate in Iceland has become warm enough for them to survive there, how did they get there in the first place? Is the atmosphere just full of insect eggs?

They probably hitched a ride on human travel. The article says "It’s unclear how the mosquito arrived in Iceland, but theories include the possibility it came via ships or containers."

Stagnant fresh water in a ship most likely.

Isn't Iceland the green island, and Greenland the icy one?

I went to Iceland for a trip in very late December. It's decidedly not green in winter.

Tomorrow is going to be the first snowy day in Reykjavik this year.

Iceland is plenty icy enough on its own. Lots of glaciers. But instead of covering 99% of the island, like Greenland, it's just a significant portion of it, instead. Also the weather there isn't particularly warm or great, even if it's more hospitable than Greenland

Iceland is more of a black stony desert.

The species in the article is already adapted to cold weather. They will find out in the spring if it is adapted well enough to survive the icelandic winter

It is remarkable this is the first time mosquitos have been found in the wild in Iceland though. Even if they died out in the winter, you would expect some to hide in shipping containers and lay eggs all summer. Which is how we got Tiger Mosquitos in New Jersey, and now it doesn't get cold enough to kill them and it is so much worse than it used to be.

Saw a tiger mosquito for the first time in Boston last fall. Reported it to the state but it is a losing battle and they are steadily establishing residency. Back again this season so a moderately cold winter still did not kill them off. They are extremely annoying as their primary prey are humans and they are very good at biting you without noticing - then comes the itch. Especially in late August into Oct.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aedes_albopictus

Lived in Mass. many years, always thought striped-leg mosquitoes were the native variety….

What did you think the city would do about it?

There are mosquitos all across the arctic, in colder places that Iceland.

They typically survive the winter in egg form.

Iceland per my visits isn't frigid on average 20 to 45 degrees Fahrenheit in January. In it's capital at least. Overall im surprised they called it IceLand vs. WindLand. The wind is fierce.

There's a (probably apocryphal) story that it was done for advertising reasons. Someone wanted people to sell land.

On old enough maps, I thought it was sometimes spelled Island not Iceland.

Yeah, is-land means ice-land in Scandinavian languages.

Getting more in the middle of winter in NSW Australia too

“Who cares if the world gets 2° warmer?”

Mosquitoes. Mosquitoes care.

While there are a lot of things we can blame on climate change, likely this isn't one of them. There are already several types of mosquitos adapted to cold temperatures, much lower than Iceland's. A rise in temperatures didn't help them get to Iceland.

The big thing with insects is going to be less about how they got there and more about whether they can survive a typical winter. Those of us in colder regions don't realize how spoiled we are for just having to wait three months for some of the worst pests to expire. Or plants for that matter.

Yes Iceland has no mosquitoes(or perhaps I should say had) but...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yMgIVx2kUH4

People hear "Iceland has no mosquitoes" and think that means "Iceland has no biting flys", spoiler, they do.

I hate mosquitoes with a passion. Might be the only species that I would want eradicated from Earth.

From my experience (based in Turkey), mosquitoes seem to be getting more and more resilient. They have become an annoyance even in autumn, and I recall catching one last winter. A few decades ago, they used to only appear in late spring and summer. Anyone have a similar experience elsewhere?

Never understood how mosquitos could survive the sub-zero temperatures of an Alaskan winter for example.

https://www.gi.alaska.edu/alaska-science-forum/how-mosquitoe...

TL;DR: Eggs and glycerol.

Insects are more resilient than mammals in many ways. For instance, radioresistance [1]. Plus fast, quantity-oriented breeding cycles that makes them more reactive to changes in the environment.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioresistance

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45661865

Ireland is still pretty much free of mosquitoes. I think it is the wind and exposure that keeps them out

Since Iceland is so isolated, it may be a good place to see if a gene drive can actually eradicate.

Having been seeing unseasonal ones in London too as of late

Historically there was malaria in southern England up to Victorian times.

Mosquitoes, Snakes & Jellyfish. Everyone else is welcome to live long & prosper but those 3 we should just remove from our planet...

Ticks are sometimes more annoying and way less ecological useful. (without mosquitos for example there would be way less birds, bats, ...)

Lots and lots of delicious ground-dwelling birds eat ticks (Turkey, Chicken, Quail), but they'd figure something else out.

But not as their main source of food as far as I know. Bugs, worms and spiders are way bigger and more common.

I’ve seen researchers suggesting that mosquitoes aren’t a big enough part of anything’s diet to be missed:

https://www.nature.com/articles/466432a

there's a large amount of endangered and critically important species for which the strongest reason the general public accepts for why we should accommodate them is "they eat X in mosquitos every night"

What are those species?

Probably tons of bats and small nocturnal mammals.

The serious proposals to eliminate mosquitoes only propose to eliminate the mosquito species that carry nasty human diseases. If those species were eliminated other mosquito species would quickly expand to replace the eliminated species.

So that's good for the birds, and bad for the humans that want to get rid of all the pesky annoying mosquitoes, not just get rid of mosquito born disease.

Although you can just make the disease carriers immune to the disease.

In that case, not even need to exterminate any species.

That's typically done by introducing some Wolbachia in their gut.

Yes, all the ectoparasites, look it up. We've eliminated most endoparasites that used to live inside us. If we figure out how to, we should eliminate the ectos, including mosquitos.

Sneks eat a lot of rodents and various garden wreckers. Unless you live somewhere where they are poisonous and bitey, they are fine. Non-poisonous snakes far outnumber the poisonous ones.

I live in an area where we have these[1], and they're generally not something you see all that often. Their biggest danger isn't their venom (they're less venomous than the diamondback) so much as their curiosity, which can get them into locations they otherwise don't belong. They aren't overly aggressive snakes, and I've encountered them several times over the years.

Alon with bullsnakes, they're extremely useful for getting rid of said rodents—which CAN carry awful pathogens, like hanta virus!

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black-tailed_rattlesnake

I lived in NC for 6 months once. My boss at the time told me I'd need to watch out for copperheads in September when they come out. Indeed, I did have to shoo one off a bike path when September came.

It's August for us here in the SW US, but there's been construction in the area that has displaced a number of them at odd times of the year.

Fortunately, snakes will generally leave you alone unless they're provoked or cornered. Unfortunately, if you have curios animals (cats, dogs) it can be a much more significant problem!

Venomous snakes far outnumber the poisonous ones.

I see I am dealing with a senior level pedant. Well done, sir!

We have only nonvenomous snakes where I live. They are welcome in the yard. My only concern is running over them with the mower.

Nah, snakes and jellyfish serve a valid purpose in the ecosystem.

But yeah, mosquitoes and cockroaches should be made extinct, even if they are tough critters.

Talking of tough though..

Say hello to the only creature that's evolved to cheat death itself: the Immortal Jellyfish. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/immortal_jellyfish

As I understand it, scientists believe that lobsters are also functionally immortal, just not invulnerable. I think the problem is that after a while, it takes so many calories to continue molting, they simply can't hold enough in their bodies or something? Anyways, they don't have an old age problem like you'd expect.

Snakes and jellyfish sounds more like a phobia issue.

The three on my "eliminate at all costs" have always been mosquitos, fleas, and ticks.

Jellyfish blooms actually are an ecological issue in some places. They thrive under certain conditions and wreck fish populations.

Finally, Iceland can feel our pain....

they have their own pain - there are those different mosquitoes, that tries to enter your every orifice. eyes, ears, nose, urethra. very annoying.

after long journey we arrived into the camp. we wondered why we were the only ones there, so we got out of the car and there they were. a lot of them. that was the fastest i ever built a tent and we jumped in it and called it an early night :)

Urethra?

That through which the urine flows/exits.

So in case of Iceland, can we call it Global Warming again? I miss that term.

Has the future arrived, bit it’s not equally distributed?

Kill them while you still can. The mosquitos in the Midwest are so ferocious their swarms can kidnap small children.

I had an employee that hailed from MN.

He had a T-shirt, with two mosquitoes on it.

The caption was "Minnesota Air Force."

When I lived in Nigeria, they had these swarms that were so dense, they could drain you of a measurable amount of blood, in a few minutes.

My sister got caught in one. Not fun.

We have a "Mosquito Park" with the Jurassic Park logo, but with a mosquito on from where we live in the north of Sweden.

There is an hypothesis that dinosaurs were already in decline before the Cretaceous extinction due to the evolution of blood-sucking insects: https://news.oregonstate.edu/news/insect-attack-may-have-bee...

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