Authors: Anu Valtonen, Tarja Salmela and Outi Rantala, University of Lapland, outi.rantala@ulapland.fi
It is evening. It is the time of the summer when mosquitoes are still everywhere – the beginning of mosquito period is already long gone, and the end is not yet approaching. We are laughing. We are standing on our bed. I am wearing my old nightdress and my partner is wearing boxers. We have a hoover with us. A hoover! This is it. We cannot stand this any longer. We have to do something; we need to be able to sleep. We hoover the mosquitoes. How did I ever think that I could do something like that? But here I am, with a hoover in my hand. We take a picture with our phone of the situation – it is such an absurd situation. Vuuuuuummmmmmmmmmmmmm – the hoover is on. I do not want to think what we are doing. And still, we are laughing. And we need to sleep.
In our research group “Intra-living in the Anthropocene”, we approach diverse multispecies encounters with the concept of care. Recently, we have focused on mosquitoes, on those tiny earthly creatures with which we share our lives – and cabin lives as the above extract illustrates. In Finland, where we all live, the mosquitoes are not toxic ones, but they are many. More precisely, there are masses of them, in particular, during the so called ‘räkkä’ period that starts around the mid-summer festival and continues until early August. How is it to encounter these tiny insects? Why should we study these multispecies encounters? How do we make a change by working with these creatures that oftentimes are found as troublesome?
First of all, there is not just one but several ways of encountering mosquitoes. Some of us use any available lethal technology and poisonings, others let the mosquitoes to enter our skins and try to get used to them, some try gently to push the mosquitoes away, away from our bedrooms, tents, and cabins, and some employ local knowledge in trying to avoid them by staying in sunny and windy places. But the mosquitoes – the mass of them in particular – can drive even the gentlest of us crazy. We can end up standing on our beds, hoovering mosquitoes.
Second, we should study mosquitoes because of their tiny size. In western societies, we tend to focus on large, charismatic species leaving smaller creatures such as insects untouched (See also Maxim’s blog posted on November 18 about how we tend to concentrate on growth). This is well visible in the proliferating field of human-animal studies: much of the studies explore species that are cute, charismatic, furry, and beneficial for humans, either socially or economically. Yet, the small ones are vital for our ecosystem.
Mosquitoes, for instance, provide an important source of nutrition for insect-eating birds, bats, and some fish, and they also pollinate plants together with horseflies. When taking into consideration how e.g. in our home country Finland there have been signs of the decrease of plant-pollinating insects, our orientation towards the killing of mosquitoes for our comfort in holidays etc. changes. Or, at least, our taken-for granted practices become wobblier. They also become wobblier when we pause to think why the (female) mosquitoes suck blood in the first place: our, and other animals’, blood is their nutrition to reproduce, to lay eggs. Why would any creature be ripped off their purpose and right to reproduce? This question is ever more important when we think about the entanglement of life where human situates in a more-than-human web of relations: we all know what happens if we do not have creatures that pollinate plants. This would mean an end of life to every species, including human. Moreover, mosquitoes affect the ecosystem through controlling the migrations of large animals such as woodland caribou in Canada (Shelomi on Quora, 2017). [ https://www.forbes.com/sites/quora/2017/09/13/what-would-happen-if-we-eliminated-the-worlds-mosquitoes/#2ca9122a11f6, last visited 19.10.19] Opinions vary in how important insects are to the ecosystem: what would actually happen if they would ‘get rid of’? What would be the consequences for the ecosystem? Yet what seems to be agreed is that the disappearance of mosquitoes from our ecosystem would have effects, and they would be far greater than the ones merely dealing with mosquito-human intra-actions.
Thirdly and finally, we might make a change by pointing out that there are also other ways to encounter the mosquitoes than to kill them. What about trying to living with them? But… how would that happen? To start, we might start wondering their beauty; appreciating the shapes of their tiny bodies and their amazing capability to still fly with their bodies full of human blood; respecting their perseverance to get to our skin – to try over and over again even when faced with various forms of hostility such as clapping hands trying to defeat them; and marvel at the work they do in the earth – and have been doing many million years before our species. Giving oneself up to a mosquito encounter forces us to acknowledge the humankind’s ridiculous attempt to control other earthly creatures. Mosquitoes, and other insects, are uncontrollable. As Hugh Raffles says in his book Insectopedia: “They’ll almost never do what we tell them to do. They’ll rarely be what we want them to be. They won’t keep still. In every respect, they are really complicated creatures” (Raffles, 2011, 4). Yes, they are… and some of them definitely found their way out of the hoover!
References
Raffles, Hugh (2011) Insectopedia. New York: Vintage Books.