Down in jungleland: Sucker Punch

A mosquito may drink up to three times her body-weight in blood in one session at the bar (and then stagger away, bloated). And yes, it’s only the ladies that indulge in the blood-boozing; their husbands, poor wimps, only sip nectar from flowers and plant juices. The lady needs your blood for the development of her babies, and she may lay 200 eggs 10 times during her lifetime.

Her eggs are laid in water of nearly any kind — fresh, polluted, stinking, still, running, even saline to an extent — depending on her species. It could be on the surface of a lake, a puddle, a pothole, a vase, an upturned tire and any suitable container. She prefers bloodsucking at dawn and dusk, though, of course, there are those brazen enough to do this in broad daylight, too.

We have, of course, spent billions in trying to eradicate them from the face of the earth. With every vile pesticide we come up with, they come up with an antidote, so to speak, and develop immunity, upping the ante in this arms race. There’s even one saintly species of mosquito, Toxorhynchites brevipalpis, which only attacks the larvae of the baddies, the blood-suckers, and which we’re trying to enlist as mass assassins.

So, can these blood-suckers actually do any good? Or, will the world be better off if we got rid of them completely? The thing is, they’ve already done us a huge service, though of course, many will not see it as such. For these deadly little ladies have been the true guardians of the rainforests around the world. They love the rainforests, and they’ve stopped us dead from swarming there and turning them into desiccated wastelands. The only reason why the fecund rainforests of Africa, the Amazon, and Southeast Asia are still standing is because they are “infested” with mosquitoes and other nasty disease-causing insects. Everyone knows what would happen if the rainforests were turned into strip malls. Nearer home, the Portuguese, after building the fine city of Vehla Goa, had to abandon their bustling capital and build Panaji, because they discovered, too late, that they had built the original on a “malarial swamp”.

There’s another huge favour the ladies have done us: Quinine was one of the medicines given for malaria in the tropics. Bitter to the extreme, the colonial Brits in Southeast Asia mixed it with sugar and soda to give us the basis for tonic water. Into which, of course, they added ice and a splash of gin to give rise to the world famous cocktail G&T. Interestingly, and aptly enough, G&Ts are generally considered to be a ladies’ drink. Well, what goes around comes around!