Climate change will spread malaria and dengue fever

Mosquitoes that transmit the diseases will spread as regions warm and grow more humid.

In my day job, working two days a week as a horticulturist for a very small zoo, there are few surprises. I mostly plant plants in the ground, trim them up from time to time, and get rid of as many weeds as I can.

Yet one day in my greenhouse not long ago, it was about midday when I saw a blur above one of the plants. Then there was another. I bent down to take a closer look. They were small and hard to see, but after a second or two, I figured out what they were. Their tall, spindly legs and backs, arched against the sky, gave them away. Hovering above and alighting on the flowers were hundreds of mosquitoes.

My first impulse was to swat and smash as many as I could. Then I thought that I should leave them alone. After all, these are the males, the ones that couldn’t bite you no matter how hard they tried. Females can’t be too far away, but I remained unbitten, thanks to long sleeves, long-legged pants, a hat, DEET, and a little bit of luck.

As a child growing up in West Virginia, mosquitoes were a summertime nuisance. For weeks I scratched their itchy bites on my arms and legs. Poison ivy was avoidable, but mosquito bites were a constant. When I first moved to southern California, one of the pleasures of living here was finding places, more arid areas, where mosquitoes were relatively absent.