Until recently, Iceland was one of the very few places in the world where you could live without the buzz of mosquitoes. The intense cold and long winters had always prevented these insects from surviving. But now even the “land of ice” must surrender to the effects of climate change: for the first time in history, mosquitoes have been found here too.
Three specimens of Culiseta annulata they were spotted north of Reykjavik by Björn Hjaltason, a keen naturalist who noticed a suspicious insect sitting on a strip of fabric soaked in wine and sugar, used to attract moths. “I immediately understood what it was,” he said. After capturing two more specimens, he sent them to the National Institute of Natural Sciences, which confirmed the discovery.
An island that warms four times more than the rest of the world
There Culiseta annulata it is a mosquito particularly resistant to the cold, capable of surviving during the winter by taking refuge in cellars, barns and other sheltered places. So far, however, she hadn’t been able to settle in Iceland either: the temperatures were simply too low.
Today the situation has changed. The island is warming at a rate four times faster than the Northern Hemisphere average. Glaciers are melting rapidly, while fish from warmer seas, such as mackerel, are increasingly swimming in Icelandic waters. The appearance of mosquitoes is therefore a concrete sign of an ecosystem that is transforming.
Experts believe that not all species will be able to survive Iceland’s harsh climate, but the presence of swamps, ponds and wetlands offers numerous potentially favorable breeding habitats. In short, the conditions that once prevented these insects from living are slowly vanishing.
Species on the move: a global domino effect
The Icelandic case is not an isolated case. In many regions of the world, global warming is favoring the migration of species northwards. In the UK, for example, eggs of the Egyptian mosquito were found this year (Aedes aegypti) and the Asian tiger mosquito (Aedes albopictus), both capable of transmitting tropical diseases such as dengue, chikungunya and Zika virus.
In Italy, the tiger mosquito is now a permanent presence, while the blue crab (Callinectes sapidus), coming from the Atlantic coasts of North America, has invaded the Adriatic, putting the ecosystems of the Goro and Scardovari lagoons in crisis. These cases show how rising temperatures are redrawing biodiversity maps, often with consequences that are difficult to predict.
Now only Antarctica remains mosquito-free. But with the progressive melting of the glaciers, even that continent cannot be considered safe. The Icelandic discovery reminds us that climate change is not an abstract concept: it is something that manifests itself in our lives, in our seas and even in the buzz of an insect that, once, seemed destined to never reach this far north.
