A warming climate has taken its toll on the Arctic's ice shelves, sea ice, and various wildlife populations, but mosquitoes are thriving.
According to The Washington Post, authors of a study published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences B found Arctic mosquitoes are growing in number and in the average individual's size.
Coinciding with the population increase is calving season for Caribou, the mosquitoes' primary prey for sucking blood. And if the female mosquitoes feed more, the entire species will be better off.
"Increased mosquito abundance, in addition to northward range expansions of additional pest species, will have negative consequences for the health and reproduction of caribou," study lead author Lauren Culler, a postdoctoral researcher at Dartmouth College's Dickey Center's Institute of Arctic Studies, said in a press release. "Warming in the Arctic can thus challenge the sustainability of wild caribou and managed reindeer in Fennoscandia (Norway, Sweden, Finland and parts of northwest Russia), which are an important subsistence resource for local communities."
The researchers focused their study on Western Greenland and were actually expecting to find a decrease in the Arctic mosquitoes' numbers, which would have triggered conservation efforts.
"We thought in a warming Arctic the predators might more eat mosquitoes on any given day, and that the mosquito population might actually go down," Culler told The Post. "I think we have yet to fully appreciate the role of mosquitoes, in the Arctic in particular.
"We definitely don't want them to disappear completely."
