Canada is widely respected and recognized for its wilderness spaces and clean environment.
Canadians love the great outdoors. Folks around here flock to the bush on warm, summer weekends to enjoy the peace and serenity of the Boreal Forest.
On those hot August nights, after a day on the lake, what could be more relaxing than sipping a cold beverage outside on the deck while the sun goes down?
And then you hear it, the quiet, unmistakable whine telling you the wee beasties have arrived. The mosquitoes have come to eat you alive.
We don’t boast about it but Canada hosts the world’s most ferocious and aggressive mosquitoes not to mention their daytime partners, black flies.
They can drive wild animals mad and make grown men cry but to enjoy our natural surroundings we must deal with these annoying parasites.
Knowledge is power. Maybe we should try to understand more about our blood-sucking adversaries before we meet them on their own turf.
Some Canadian Arctic researchers did exactly that. They wondered how many times a guy would get bitten if he sat outside on the tundra for a while.
The results of this nightmare experiment revealed that an unprotected researcher sitting in a swarm of hungry mosquitoes would receive about 9,000 bites per minute.
Many campers in Northwestern Ontario can relate to that. After the first few hundred bites, you hardly notice.
Anyway, it’s nothing to get alarmed about. Each bite only sucks up five one-millionths of a litre of blood.
And besides, as we all know it’s only the females that bite. The males lead rather dull, uninteresting lives and to their credit, they don’t pester us or drive us crazy.
But given the number of bloodthirsty (and love-starved) females in the swarm, there’s a pretty good chance the dudes will connect at least once in their short lives.
Once the deed is done, the numbers are impressive.
Under ideal conditions each adult lady mosquito uses our blood to produce 10 batches of eggs over her two-month life span.
If each new mosquito begins producing within two weeks, in five generations 20 million pests could be on the wing and searching for blood.
Speaking of wings, they flutter up to 500 times a minute which allows these flimsy pests to fly forward, backward, sideways and even upside down.
Mosquitoes move slowly, less than two kilometres per hour. We could easily outrun their attack but what they lack in speed they make up for with numbers.
And just so you know, one study revealed that mosquito activity increases up to 500 times during a full moon. It must be murder on werewolves.
Most of us have imagined a world where these pesky little insects don’t exist. What could they possibly be good for?
That huge biomass is more than just a major bummer on camping trips. Environmentalists say that eliminating mosquitoes would leave a huge environmental scar.
Predators such as birds, bats and spiders would be left without prey.
There would be a huge gap in the aquatic life chain and many plants, blueberries included, would go unpollinated.
Most Canadians would still risk it and that goes for black flies too, which, I understand, don’t really bite at all.
They just use their saw-like teeth to scrape away the top layers of skin while they quietly and painlessly lap up our blood.
But Canadians love the outdoors and when we see the moonlight shining on a midnight lake or hear the lonely cry of a wild loon, the wee beasties become just a minor inconvenience.
Enjoy it while it lasts.
