First mosquitoes found in Iceland are sign of climate change
For the first time, mosquitoes have been found in Iceland and the discovery has caused quite a stir. Iceland had been thought to be one of only two mosquito-free regions in the world, partly due to its cold climate — the other region without mosquitoes being Antarctica.
The mosquitoes in Iceland were discovered by an insect enthusiast, Bjorn Hjaltason, in a valley southwest of Reykjavik. The insects were later confirmed to be Culiseta annulata, a large mosquito and also one of the few mosquito species thought to be capable of surviving winters in Iceland, although it remains to be seen whether the insects will become permanently established there.
This species of mosquito, also called the banded house mosquito, is common across the UK, parts of Europe and north Africa, which raises the question of how it came to be in Iceland. The answer to that remains uncertain, although Hjaltason suspected the mosquitoes arrived on ships or containers from a port a few kilometres away from where he discovered them.
The sight of mosquitoes so far north brought to mind another surprising story from 20 years ago, when a wasp, Vespula intermedia (the northern, or American, red-banded yellowjacket wasp), was found in the community of Arctic Bay on the northern tip of Baffin Island, far inside the Arctic Circle of Canada. The finding was made by the mayor of Arctic Bay, Noire Ikalukjuaq, who said that the discovery was so extraordinary there was no word for “wasp” in the local Inuktitut language. He warned other villagers not to touch a wasp if they saw one to avoid being stung.
And in 2017, at Utqiagvik, formerly called Barrow, a coastal village in the far north of Alaska, a child was actually stung by a wasp. This would hardly be remarkable in the rest of the US, but no one in Utqiagvik could ever remember such a thing happening there.
Along with the wasp, the villagers also reported seeing dragonflies zipping over their local rivers for the first time, and spotted many new birds, including a growing number of chickadees, small birds with a distinctive big round head and small body.