The truth about mosquitos

It might occur to you, reading this often terrifying little book about mosquitos, that we don't fear these creatures nearly as much as we should. They breed in swamps, they attack at night, they suck your blood and they spread some of the world's nastiest diseases - malaria, yellow fever, dengue fever, and encephalitis, for instance. A mosquito alights on her victim (bloodsuckers are female), and cuts into the flesh with a proboscis "like the complex devices surgeons snake through a body to perform remote-control surgery". Her body heavy with blood, she then flies a wobbly course to the nearest vertical surface in order to digest her meal. When you swat her, the wall will be stained with a red blob.

This is the story of the career of Andrew Spielman, a mosquito expert, with the collaboration of a journalist, Michael D'Antonio. Spielman hopes that the reader will come to "respect, and, perhaps, admire the mosquito as something more than just a pest or a vector of disease". He is passionate about mosquitos. "No animal on earth," he tells us, "has touched so directly and profoundly the lives of so many human beings." Put bluntly, the mosquito has achieved this status by infecting us with horrible diseases which often kill us. But she doesn't mean to kill us - she just needs our blood. Sometimes you get the impression that Spielman sees the mosquito as a noble and misunderstood creature, rather like Tom Cruise in Interview With The Vampire.

Do you know why mosquitos suck your blood? I didn't. They need blood "to fuel the production of eggs". So the mosquito that bites you is always a female in a reproductive frenzy. It's a body-clock thing. Mosquitos, Spielman tells us, are rapacious and ruthless - not unlike human beings, you might think. For one thing, the mosquito is "a self-serving creature". Unlike other animals, they do not do their bit for the environment; unlike ants and worms, they do not aerate the soil, and neither is the mosquito "an important pollinator of plants, like the bee". Mosquitos, like humans, have a single purpose - the perpetuation of their own interests.

And they're hard to eradicate. For years, the American government tried to wipe them out using DDT, a particularly noxious poison. But the Americans' success was only partial; a strain of DDT-resistant mosquitos has now emerged. Recently, New York has been struck by a cluster of mosquito-spread West Nile virus, an African disease. Like humans, mosquitos like to travel on long-haul flights. If you read this crisp, intelligent book you will like mosquitos less than you did before. But you will respect them more.