Why Giant Mosquitoes are Suddenly Swarming Greenland

If you catch a Greenlandic mosquito in your fist, do not relax your fingers. Unless you’ve clasped your grip so tightly that you fear you’ve broken skin and then squeezed a bit more, you haven’t killed it. When you loosen your grip, the mosquito will simply fly away faster than you can react, a bit battered perhaps, but still able to take a bite out of you.

“They’re aggressive because they’re desperate,” says Lauren Culler an ecologist with Dartmouth’s Institute of Arctic Studies who researches Greenland’s mosquitoes. “My research here,” says Culler, “has found that only 12-15 percent of mosquitoes ever get a blood meal.”

Read the entire article on Motherboard at http://motherboard.vice.com/read/why-giant-mosquitoes-are-suddenly-swarming-greenland.