Tag Archives: ecology

Would We Maybe Miss Mosquitoes?

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It’s a buggy time of year and I’m feeling swarmed and itchy. Mosquitoes are in the family Culicadae and a common genus around here is Anopheles. In Greek, ano means “not” and ophelos means “profit.”  By that term, mosquitoes are defined as “useless.”

The persistent critters seemed worse than useless to me when I was a kid trying to sleep and, no matter how many I swatted, there was always one last mosquito in my room humming the lullaby of the damned.  I’d wake up with more itchy bumps the next morning.

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Those bloodsuckers (ectoparasites) are the female mosquitoes.  They need the blood to produce eggs.  The male sticks to sipping nectar and then swarms with the other guys at dusk until a female enters their midst to mate, an aerial bar scene.  A couple weeks later, they die.

I like to think that all the species in nature have their purposes and that we would miss them if they became extinct.  Bugs and other pests probably inspired humans to create shelter and clothing, so maybe architects, builders, and the garment industry should feel beholden to them. Also, without female mosquitoes, there would have been no Jurassic Park!  Their little bodies embedded in amber were the vessels for the DNA of long-extinct dinosaurs, brought back to life, or so the story goes.

I set out to look for arguments on behalf of mosquitoes and couldn’t find a single convincing one. Instead I found some widespread consensus that mosquitoes would not be missed if they were eliminated from the earth.  According to experts, their ecological niche would be filled in no time.  Certain animals that have evolved to eat the insects and their larvae, such as the mosquitofish, would miss them for a while until they found other prey.  Animals that I thought depended on a diet of mosquitoes, like bats, would not be all that affected.  When scientists examined the contents of bat bellies, they found mostly moths and only 2% mosquitoes in there.

A million people die each year from malaria carried by mosquitoes, and that is just one of many deadly diseases they spread.  In the Midwest, we worry about getting West Nile virus. Will we ever wipe out disease-carrying mosquitoes or will they wipe us out first?  We can tell them to buzz off and zap them with insecticide and, within a few generations, within less than a year, their species can develop resistance to it.

The Culcidae tribe has been around for at least 79 million years and it looks like they’ll be buzzing around our ears for a few zillion more.

 

Back to the Shack

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Looking out from the Shack

The final section of A Sand County Almanac (1949) is called “The Outlook.”  In it Aldo Leopold considered various attitudes, from “the farmer for whom the land is still an adversary” to the urban dweller who “is separated from the land by many middlemen, and by innumerable physical gadgets.”  He worried in the 1940s that land had become, for some, merely “the space between cities on which crops grow,” though most people still lived in those rural spaces.  In our time, for the first time, more people in the world live in cities than in the country.

He also worried about the habit of viewing the land as a commodity.  For Leopold–outdoorsman, ecologist, professor of game management–it boiled down to valuing our natural environment for so much more than its economic value.  “It is inconceivable to me that an ethical relation to land can exist without love, respect, admiration,” he wrote.  He saw himself as part of a community, integrally connected to the plants, animals, water, air, and the soil itself.

It was about a year ago that I biked to the Shack where Leopold wrote about the land ethic and practiced its principles.  The building was not open at the time.  (See my September 18, 2010 post.)  I went back last week for two days of Land Ethic Leadership training, with plentiful role models of the love and respect of which Leopold spoke.  We learned in large groups, small groups, and out on the land.  We hiked in silence to a prairie remnant at the top of a Baraboo bluff.  I lay on a slab of ancient red stone and watched the grass and sky.   We also removed invasive plant species around the Leopold Center buildings.  Mostly, we talked about how to talk about conservation and the health of the land.

A highlight for many of us was to go inside the famous Shack at the very end of our training.  It is hard to believe that Aldo, Estella, and their five children stayed inside the tiny, dim space that was once a chicken coop.  Well, they slept on the bunks there, but mostly, I suppose, they were outside–planting the trees and wildflowers I admired from the window of the Shack and generally enjoying their time together in nature.

Leopold knew that our attitudes toward nature are always shifting, as his certainly did.  The land ethic is not a static thing that he could capture in words, because it is evolving.  Being in the woods and prairies, feeling the presence of Aldo’s daughter, Nina Leopold Bradley who died just a few months ago at the age of 93, and warmed by the light of the people at the Center, I was changed. Somehow my outlook from the window of the Shack took me beyond the pines, beyond the Wisconsin River, and back up to the top of that bluff.  I could see for miles.

Gathering at the Shack