Mosquito: A Deadly Beneficiary of Climate Change...

“Climate change will expose half of the world’s population to disease-spreading mosquitoes by 2050.”

While it can be easy to cast the ups and downs of evolution in moralistic terms, but there are winners and losers to the effects of climate change ~ at least in the short term environment.

Mosquitos thrive in hot and humid environments. Rising sea levels, unusual precipitation patterns, and climbing temperatures all contribute to an environment far more palatable to these tiny vampires.

Unfortunately, a win for mosquitos is a loss for humans. Mosquitos are the most deadly animal to humans with over a million deaths a year attributed to disease spread by mosquitos.

That’s a serious public health risk for communities that already have to deal with infected mosquitos but as temperatures warm at higher elevations, it will allow mosquitos into previously inaccessible ecosystems where they could have the impact of an invasive species and have a decimating impact on communities of people who neither needed to develop immunity to diseases like malaria and Zyka nor the infrastructure to confront such a public health emergency.

But a 2019 study published in Communications Biology suggested an even more worrying effect on mosquitos by global warming. They discovered through 200 million years of modeling that the speed at which mosquitos mutate and thus evolve rises dramatically in conjunction with both rising temperatures and CO2 levels. More mosquito breeds mean more mosquitos in general, but it could also bring new diseases and the ability to survive in more environments.