They swarm and bite and draw blood. They make you swell and itch and scratch. They buzz your ears, crawl into noses, creep beneath socks. They drive people indoors, torment gardeners and ruin strolls. They stampede the tourists. They drive some of us mad.
Not to mention, they utterly stole the show when a group of scientists attempted to memorialize the death of Michael Jackson with an "Arctic Thriller" dance routine on the tundra north of the Brooks Range.
Watch the video closely, and you can see them dancing on the camera lens itself: Mosquitoes thick enough to inhale. Is nothing sacred to a bug?
As Alaska races into the season of perpetual light -- adding more than five minutes of direct sunlight every single day in Anchorage, for instance -- the grass has been greening and buds emerging. The creeks have opened. At least one hapless black bear has been chased through city neighborhoods by fence-scrambling state biologists and shotgun toting cops.
But amid all these Disney-certified harbingers of northern spring lurks the summer scourge. In every tepid pool and scummy backwater, from city greenbelts and to wilderness taiga so remote it has no 3G coverage, they are hatching.
We're talking jillions here: mosquitoes, midges, gnats, black flies, hornets and other stuff we can't even spell check. Alaska teems with these creepy crawlies all summer long.
"The floor of the boreal forest is often so alive you can almost see it move," wrote Ned Rozell of the Alaska Science Forum. "Biologist Stephen MacLean once did the math -- about one-half million soil mites, eight-legged relatives of the spiders, occupy each three-foot square of soil by the end of summer."
"Together, the soil mites and the springtails form a mass of about 34,000 pounds per square mile," MacLean wrote in 1980. "That is equal to 320,000 field mice or 43 moose."
More mosquitoes per acre than people on Earth
Leaving aside the startling prospect of 50 pounds of teeny-tiny, eight-legged creatures squirming within every acre of dirt underfoot, let's concentrate on the things that wing right into our faces.
Alaska's black flies, tiny biting midges called no-see-ums, and wasps of various kinds will pester and then destroy your barbecue or campsite bonfire with robotic persistence. Tidewater beaches, in particular, can swarm with flies that crawl under clothing and gnaw into the skin around your eyes and noses and sock rims. Step a few feet into Alaska's soggy forest, and you could easily fill your esophagus with a half dozen Aedes skeeters in the prime of their lives.
One scientist reported that more than 12 million adult mosquitoes wing over each acre of infested northern tundra, and maybe as many as 600,000 black fly larvae ooze from three square feet of streambed, reports Rozell.
Of the world's 3,000-plus species of mosquitoes, only about 150 occur in the United States with maybe one-fifth of those showing up in Alaska. Most of them don't target humans, and among those that do, only the females do the biting, seeking that estimated one-millionth of a gallon of blood needed to lay a clutch of eggs. (Both male and female mosquitoes eat plant nectar for energy, says the Center for Vector Biology at Rutgers.)
Mosquitoes transmit at least three potentially fatal diseases to humans in the United States -- West Nile Virus, Malaria and Dengue Fever, according to the National Pest Management Association. Not so in Alaska, so far, although health officials monitor for West Nile Virus.
"Alaska does not have reports of locally-acquired dengue fever, malaria or West Nile Virus," wrote Ann Potempa, a spokeswoman for the state Division of Public Health in an email. "We have had reports of all three of these, however, diagnosed in people who had been traveling and acquired the diseases Outside."
The local skeeter crop includes at least 33 species among four genera, according to a study of Anchorage mosquitoes conducted in 2002 on Fort Elmendorf. Using four small traps, these scientists caught 1,755 mosquitoes of at least seven different species over just four nights at a park on the base.
The 25 species of the Aedes genus, including the persistent Aedes communis that ranges across most of the state between May and June, cause most of the human discomfort.
"Aedes communis is the most common and widely distributed species of mosquito in Alaska. It is predominately a forest species and can be found in a wide variety of temporary, shallow pools in its larval phase. At Anchorage, peak emergence begins at the end of May and continues through June."
Other species tag team, spreading their coverage throughout the year, some hatching out just before or just after the Aedes peak. They include the Culiseta genera of "snow mosquitoes" that rise from rotting drifts to bite people still wearing ski gear.
"The largest of Alaskan mosquitoes, Culiseta Alaskaensis … overwinters as an adult under the snow, usually in leaf litter, beneath loose tree bark, or in dead tree stumps," says Alaska Science Forum.
A 'most terrible and poignant infliction'
All types of buzzing critters tormented Alaska's first American explorers, who often reported the experience of torture and madness as they were pricked, and pricked, and pricked.
"Assaults of venomous insects," wrote the intrepid Archdeacon Hudson Stuck, author of Ten Thousand Miles with a Dog Sled and The Ascent of Denali, "are a greater hindrance to summer travel than any extremity of cold is to winter."
In 1880, U.S. Census taker I. Petrof called them "the most terrible and poignant infliction" possible, according an account published in that (all-but forgotten) classic, Mosquitoes of Alaska.
"I refer to the clouds of bloodthirsty mosquitoes, accompanied by a vindictive ally in the shape of a small poisonous black fly," Petroff wrote.
The traveler who exposes his bare eyes or face here loses his natural appearance; his eyelids swell up and close, and his face becomes one mass of lumps and fiery pimples. Mosquitoes torture the Indian dogs to death, especially if one of these animals, by mange or otherwise, loses an inconsiderable portion of its thick hairy covering, and even drive the bear and the deer into the water.
Yukon River prospector Jack Cornell described his "terror" during one rainy summer when the bugs chewed up and destroyed his head net.
"I honestly believe they eat it up they was that thick and that venomous," he said, quoted here by Stuck. "The only chance to sleep was to travel so long and so hard that I fell asleep as soon as I stopped."
So what to do? A bug primer
- Wear tight knit long-sleeve shirts and pants, and tuck the legs into your socks. Yes, you will look like a nerd. But Alaskans dont mind. Much.
- Get a head net and drape it over a baseball-type cap. Most of the torture that comes from mosquitoes and flies occurs as they crawl into your ears and land on your eyelids. An inexpensive head net can keep you sane. Consider wearing gloves while hiking to protect your hands
- Use bug spray containing DEET on clothing and sparingly on skin. Theres lots of stuff on the market, but the best ingredient for keeping bugs away is a compound called N,N-Diethyl-meta-toluamide or DEET. The chemical was long thought to prevent mosquitoes from smelling exhaled carbon dioxide, which helps them find their mammalian prey. But newer research has found that DEET essentially "blinds" insects neurologically from responding to humans even though they can still smell the CO2. It also repels mosquitoes directly by its nasty (to a bug, at least) odor. "DEET was developed by the U.S. Department of Agriculture and was registered for use by the general public in 1957," explains the American Mosquito Control Association. "It is effective against mosquitoes, biting flies, chiggers, fleas, and ticks. Decades of empirical testing of more than 20,000 other compounds has not resulted in other repellent products with the duration of protection and broad-spectrum effectiveness of DEET."
- Many people swear by 100 percent concentrations of DEET and refuse to use any other, although some scientists say going above 50 percent is unnecessary. The Centers for Disease Control have published a decent DEET use primer.
- Burn old-fashioned mosquito coils, especially if you can sit under a tarp or inside a semi-enclosed space. They work.
- And what is the record mosquito kill anyway? Ever since the Brave Little Tailor exterminated seven flies with one blow, Alaskans have been grappling for their own bragging rights to the claim of most-mosquitoes-squashed-at-once. Many newspapers and others have frequently have published the figure of "77." But no one seems to know the source of this apocryphal statistic.
- Roman Dial, a bona fide scientist at Alaska Pacific University and well-known backcountry trekker, once told a reporter that hed killed 84 mosquitoes with one well-timed slap to the exposed skin of his thigh. This appears to rule, for now, present Alaskan insecticidal aspirations. But what do we know?
So let's help out those Cheechakoes and tourists. Put your best bug-battling advice and lore below.
Contact Doug O'Harra at doug(at)alaskadispatch.com