Arctic’s Mosquito Problem Is Worsening (‘National Geographic’)

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“It is the talk of the town when the Arctic mosquitoes are out,” says Dartmouth’s Lauren Culler, who studies insects in Greenland, in a National Geographic story about the effect of climate change on mosquitoes in the Arctic. “There aren’t a lot of animals for them to eat in the Arctic, so when they finally find one, they are ferocious. They are relentless. They do not stop. They just keep going after you.”

Culler is an Arctic postdoctoral fellow and outreach coordinator for the John Sloan Dickey Center for International Understanding’s Institute of Arctic Studies.

“Climate change, it turns out, may make that even worse,” writes the magazine. “Large blood-sucking mosquitoes already are the bane of people, caribou, reindeer, and other mammals eking out a living in the frozen north. But as temperatures warm, mosquitoes above the Arctic Circle emerge earlier, grow faster, and survive as winged pests even longer, according to Culler’s new research,” which was published Tuesday in Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

Read the full story, published 9/15/15 by National Geographic.

This story has been featured in many other media outlets, including The Washington Post, The Atlantic, and The Christian Science Monitor.

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