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In the 1950s, French filmmaker Albert Lamorisse cocreated what would become one of the most popular board games in history. La Conquete du Monde (“The Conquest of the World”) was a global domination game in which players position armies across six multicolored continents in a bid to take over the world. Victory hinges on strength of arms via attacking territories, fortifying and expanding armies, and occupying countries that are easy to hold. The outcome of every battle is a roll of the dice. In 1957, Parker Brothers published the first edition and gave it a new name: Risk.
It turns out Lamorisse left out the most consequential player of all, a global actor whose own dice toss has decided more battles and influenced more lives than any others’ in human history: the mosquito.
“The mosquito has killed more human beings than any other animal—nearly half of all human beings that have ever lived,” Timothy C. Winegard, author of the nearly 500-page epic The Mosquito: A Human History of Our Deadliest Predator (Dutton, August 2019), told Sierra. “The contest is not even close.”
The greatest empires and their military campaigns, along with the economic and cultural ramifications thereof—the Peloponnesian War, the Roman Empire, the Columbian Exchange, the American colonial wars—were inextricably shaped, and in some cases decided, by vector mosquitoes delivering biological weapons like malaria and yellow fever to colonists and conquerors the world over. As the game of colonial domination played out over 2,000 years, Winegard asserts, it was not military might or the cunning strategy of generals that decided that game, but a tiny insect that has done more to shape the trajectory of modern human civilization than any other animal on the planet.
The claim sounds fantastic, but even a casual glance through The Mosquito will convince you. The stories behind some of the most recognizable figures from history—Sophocles, Atila the Hun, John Smith and Mataoka (or known by the colonial name “Pocahontas”), Oliver Cromwell—were all influenced in some way (or brought to a feverish end) by an insect barely the size of your fingernail.
The mosquito first appeared 190 million years ago, followed not long after by the parasite that causes malaria. Together, they formed one of the deadliest marriages on earth. The mosquito transmits any of about 15 diseases through its bite, malaria being one of the most lethal. Amber-encased mosquitoes infected with malaria date back to the age of the dinosaur, an age that, Winegard notes, the mosquito helped bring to an end.
Male mosquitoes do not bite; their sole purpose is to procreate, which they do by banding together in a massive swarm, into which dive-bombing females zero in on a mate. A female collects sperm and divvies it out over time to produce multiple batches of eggs. To feed her progeny, she needs dinner. That’s where we come in.
The mosquito likes to hunt at dusk and near ground, which is why she’s often circling around your ankles at sunset (attention hikers: She favors bright colors, beer drinkers, and bursts of carbon dioxide). After landing, she uses two serrated mandible-cutting blades to saw through your skin, then stabs you with a hypodermic syringe from which she sucks as much as three to five milligrams of blood.
The bite itself isn’t deadly, but the diseases it can deliver are. “Once you go further down the rabbit hole,” Winegard says, “you realize that with the revolutions in the United States and Haiti and in south Central America, it was the mosquito that was the undoing of the colonial powers.”
Winegard, a professor of history and political science at Colorado Mesa University, has long been fascinated with military history. He grew up in Sarny, Ontario, where his life was consumed with (what else?) hockey. But he also grew up listening to his great-great-grandfather William tell stories about being in the trenches during World War I. Both his great- and great-great-grandfathers were civilian soldiers, not career military men. Winegard served himself for several years in the Canadian British forces, got his master’s at the Royal Military College of Canada, the equivalent of Westpoint, and then his PhD at Oxford.
Sierra spoke with Timothy Winegard about the world’s deadliest predator, and how it has changed the course of human history—even his own.
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Sierra: The rhetorical framing in The Mosquito is very clear from the start, where you write that “we are war with the mosquito,” and you go on to refer to it alternately as a “grim reaper” and “harvester of humanity.” Why did you want to position the mosquito as a kind of antagonist with which we are at war?
Timothy Winegard: We forget that history is not the artifact of inevitability. There are powerful forces beyond human agency at play in the world beyond our control. We tend to think that we are very smart and we can control our surroundings, and we can’t.
The mosquito is a prime example. Throughout our history, we have been at war with this animal, trying to mitigate her dealings in death, and we failed at every turn. Our science, our weapons of mass destruction against the mosquito—whether it’s DDT, malaria drugs, malaria vaccines—they’ve all failed. The mosquito continues to be the deadliest animal to human beings on the planet, even with all our science.
People like to hear about war and battles and being a military historian. Being in the military myself, framing it as a constant war throughout our existence as hominids and Homo sapiens just fit.
There are a lot of different predators with which human beings have had to contend. Why pick the mosquito in particular?
The animal is universal. It exists all over the world except for a few tiny isolated areas—Antarctica, the Seychelles, and a couple Pacific Islands—so everybody is familiar with this omnipresent creature that’s an annoyance at best and a killer at worst. Only 1,200 people die of the plague now, which is a bacteria, whereas the mosquito primarily spreads viruses.
The danger from the mosquito is not directly from her bite, as you write in the book, but rather from what lurks behind that bite: the viruses she’s carrying, and the fact that she’s a vector for those viruses—malaria in particular. Talk about how she does her deadly work.
Hollywood unfortunately has done us a disservice with these movies about anacondas and crocodiles, which by comparison kill relatively few people. The stuff of our child nightmares is not what we should actually be afraid of. Sharks kill 10 people on average per year, whereas the mosquito kills upwards of 2 million. We forget that the mosquito is such a potent threat, mainly because it’s a small animal and it’s everywhere, and because in most of the Western world it’s just an annoyance that bites you and leaves an itch; the affluent world is generally free from mosquito-borne disease. With the emergence of West Nile and Zika, the mosquito has been put back on the radar in the last few years. Now these diseases affect the United States and Canada and wealthy European countries, so I think people are starting to pay attention. But we always should’ve paid attention, because diseases never went away.
Yellow fever has been generally eradicated from most of the world. But it was a dreaded killer up until the vaccine in the 1930s. We don’t think of yellow fever anymore, but it was the primary killer of the mosquito-borne diseases along with malaria.
It’s a sophisticated animal to say the least. She needs our blood to procreate and lay her eggs and raise her children if you will. Like any other parent, she fulfills her duty to the best she can, and in the process, bequeaths not just humans but tons of animals with mosquito-borne disease.
It does seem like malaria holds a very special place in this story. I’m reminded of how ticks and Lyme disease go hand in hand. The mosquito and malaria are one of the deadliest marriages in history.
Malaria is the most widespread mosquito-borne disease. The falciparum malaria is one of the paramount killers, especially if you take yellow fever off the table, which is only recently. Malaria shows up 130 million years ago in birds. It’s kind of tracked our evolutionary process as hominids up to modern Homo sapiens and then our split from the great apes, so it’s stalked our evolutionary tree. It has influenced even our DNA with sickle cell and other genetic alterations that have evolved to try to combat malaria.
For a lot of people, malaria is always present and has never gone away. The United States used to be crawling with malaria. Until the last century, the US was a malaria hotbed, especially in the southern United States and the Mississippi Delta. We forget that. My great-grandfather William got malaria in the First World War. It was a baptism of living almost.
You tell a fascinating story in the book about how the mosquito reconfigured the colonial map and how it prospered at the intersections of colonial wars and the expansion of economic and travel routes. You mention at one point that the mosquito was the accidental conqueror of Indigenous peoples in the Americas and that we need to revise our understanding of how some of these histories played out—that they weren’t necessarily at the behest of human hands, but rather at the direction of this one tiny animal.
With the Columbian Exchange, slavery was a key component to plantation profit in the Americas, whether that’s for Spain, or eventually England, France, the Netherlands, Denmark, and some of the smaller countries running around the Caribbean at that time. In a way, the colonial powers of Europe set up their own demise when they bring African slaves to the New World; they bring with them not only the diseases but also stowaway mosquitoes, and those mosquitoes thrive in the Americas that were void of any mosquito-borne disease prior to that time. So the imported mosquitoes are vectoring the disease, but also, the local anopheles mosquitoes that had followed their own path free of disease until that time very quickly started vectoring malaria specifically.
We hear about smallpox and tuberculosis and the measles, but mosquito-borne diseases have been given very little air time as part of that story: the horrific reduction of 95 million people, or 95 percent of the Indigenous peoples of the Americas, through disease.
When I jumped into the primary sources, specifically, there was so much pointing to malaria having been a huge part of that cataclysmic near-extinction of Indigenous peoples from disease. The mosquito helped colonization at the beginning, and then became the opposite end of the sword and undid colonial European control over the western hemisphere. These European powers were sending fresh, unseasoned troops into this furnace of mosquito-borne disease, specifically into the southern colonies of the United States and the Caribbean. Then they were shredded in the colonial wars by mosquito-borne disease.
You get this sense of human beings stumbling around in the world, not understanding the circumstances of these countries they are trying to conquer.
Absolutely, and without the knowledge of modern medicine, the mosquito wasn’t really unmasked until the 1890s and the early 1900s. It’s only been in the past 100 years that we understood what is causing these diseases and their horrific death rates. Prior to that, it was the miasmic theory, that it was foul air emanating from swamps and stagnant water. Those theories were tantalizingly close to the actual culprit of the mosquito, but no one connected the dots.
Once you follow the rabbit hole, it’s quite extraordinary just how influential the mosquito was in shaping the modern world order both culturally and geographically.
That same kind of human arrogance is fully on display right now given what we’ve done to precipitate global warming. How will a warming world have an impact on the mosquito’s relationship to us?
Global warming is creating a perfect storm for mosquito-borne disease. Climate is something we can’t control, just like the mosquito. With global warming, the range of the mosquito is expanding into places like southern Canada, where you wouldn’t have had those mosquito species before, but now they can survive and transmit disease farther north or south than they have been before, as well as in the higher elevations.
The book mainly positions us in a kind of war for survival, with the mosquito as a malefactor to be feared, if not defeated. At the same time, you acknowledge that the mosquito has changed the course of history in ways big and small—even of your own personal history. You write about how a bout of malaria is the reason why your great-grandpa William met a young girl on a boat, and that young girl later became his wife, Hilda. If that hadn’t happened, you’d likely not be alive today.
I started out the book big to get people’s attention, that we are at war with the mosquito. At the end of the book I wanted to make the story and the mosquito itself more human, and put a face to not only her as an animal that is simply trying to procreate and be a good mother, if you will, but also to the story of the statistics and the mind-boggling death rates that we see throughout the book.
I got to know my great-grandpa William when I was growing up. He died when I was 10, so I got to hear stories of the First World War and the Second World War and the Depression. I was fascinated with his stories; I would sit on his knee and listen to him talk about being in the trenches on the western front and his experiences after he was sent home for being wounded in 1916, then joining the navy and being off the coast of West Africa on a mine sweeper. He would talk about malaria and his relapses with it. He was one of my heroes and had a big influence on my life, personally and academically. He also did a lot of good in his community, being the first mayor of Caledonia and giving all his money away during the Depression to people who needed it. For me, that story and how he met my great-grandmother Hilda was a nice way to wrap up the book, and bring it back to the reader in a more personal way.
I wouldn’t be here if he didn’t contract malaria and meet my great-great-grandma on that boat.
Read more: sierraclub.org