>ACTUALLY HAVING MOSQUITOES IN YOUR COUNTRY

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>In the sense of the entire family Culicidae, mosquitoes are cosmopolitan; in every land region except for Antarctica and a few islands, mainly in polar or subpolar climates, at least some species of mosquito will be present. Iceland is such an island, being essentially free of mosquitoes.

>The absence of mosquitoes from Iceland and similar regions is probably because of quirks of their climate, which differs in some respects from mainland regions. At the start of the uninterrupted continental winter of Greenland and the northern regions of Eurasia and America, the pupa enters diapause under the ice that covers sufficiently deep water.

>The imago ecloses only after the ice breaks in late spring. In Iceland however, the weather is less predictable. In mid-winter it frequently warms up suddenly, causing the ice to break, but then to freeze again after a few days. By that time the mosquitoes will have emerged from their pupae, but the new freeze sets in before they can complete their life cycle.

>Any anautogenous adult mosquito would need a host to supply a blood meal before it could lay viable eggs; it would need time to mate, mature the eggs and oviposit in suitable wetlands. These requirements would not be realistic in Iceland and in fact the absence of mosquitoes from such subpolar islands is in line with the islands' low biodiversity; Iceland has fewer than 1500 described species of insects, many of them probably accidentally introduced by human agency.