Media Spins Three Icelandic Mosquitoes Into a Climate Story – Watts Up With That?

Several major outlets, including NPR, The Washington Post, and The Guardian, recently reported the discovery of three mosquitoes in Iceland as proof that global warming has arrived in the North Atlantic. According to the coverage, the presence of the species Culiseta annulata “shows how climate change is making Iceland more hospitable for insects.”

Each story followed the same template: a small event, inflated into a global narrative. But a closer look at the facts — and the research on Arctic mosquito ecology — suggests a much simpler, less dramatic explanation.

The insects identified were Culiseta annulata, a species long established throughout northern Europe and the British Isles. As the Natural Science Institute of Iceland itself explained, these mosquitoes can “live in cold weather, usually finding shelter in outbuildings and basements.” That’s an adaptation, not a symptom of climate change.

The Institute also noted that the mosquitoes likely arrived by freight or air transport — not by natural migration. Iceland is separated from other landmasses by hundreds of miles of open ocean, and mosquitoes do not travel across the Atlantic under their own power. The explanation “arrived by freight” is found directly in the NPR story — a line that would normally end any speculation about climate causation.

If temperature and latitude alone determined mosquito presence, then Alaska, Canada, and Svalbard would be insect-free. Instead, these regions are known for their intense summer mosquito swarms.

Peer-reviewed work in the Ecological Society of America’s journal Ecosphere (“Spatial heterogeneity in the abundance and fecundity of Arctic mosquitoes,” Culler et al., 2018) documented large populations of Arctic mosquitoes thriving at average summer temperatures of only 4–10°C. Figure 1 in that study shows mosquito emergence occurring at temperatures barely above freezing.

A second paper, “Spatial and temporal patterns in Arctic mosquito abundance” (Coulson et al., 2022), found densities exceeding 1,000 individuals per square kilometer in Svalbard — one of the coldest inhabited areas on Earth. If mosquitoes prosper north of 78° latitude, Iceland’s isolated incident tells us little about “warming.”

Shipping, Not Shifting Climate

Even the scientists quoted in the news stories hinted at this. In the Washington Post, Australian entomologist Philip Weinstein observed that “even for a cold-adapted species, the harsh conditions of Iceland would make it more challenging for it to survive and establish itself locally.” He added that the species is “extremely unlikely to act as a disease transmitter.” That suggests a transient occurrence, not the dawn of a new ecosystem.

Transport and trade are far more credible vectors than temperature. As global shipping and air travel expand, so does the incidental movement of insects. This pattern has been well-documented in biological literature as “anthropogenic introduction” — species traveling with humans, not with the climate.

Field studies in Alaska and Svalbard reveal that mosquito abundance depends mostly on snowmelt timing and water persistence, not gradual warming. Culler et al. (2018) demonstrated (Fig. 2) that mosquito emergence peaks when surface ponds persist into late July, regardless of mean temperature. Coulson et al. (2022) found that population density correlated more strongly with standing-water duration (R² = 0.73) than with air temperature (R² = 0.12). In short: mosquitoes need puddles, not a specific climate.

Each article used nearly identical framing. The Guardian declared that “global heating makes the country more hospitable for insects.” The Post called it “a development potentially linked to global warming.” And NPR assured readers that “the Arctic region is warming at more than double the rate of the global average.”

Yet all three also admitted that cargo and human activity probably brought the insects there. That contradiction — attributing the event to both transport and temperature — highlights the problem with treating every biological observation as a climate signal.

The Arctic already hosts thriving mosquito populations. The species Aedes nigripes and Aedes impiger have adapted to subfreezing winters and extremely short summers. Alaskans have joked for decades that “the mosquito is the state bird.” That’s not new — it’s natural history.

Iceland’s isolation, lack of wetlands, and oceanic climate have prevented these species from establishing there, not because of cold per se, but because of geography and ecology. One freight container or airplane with a few stowaway insects does not change that fundamental limitation.

Conclusion

Three mosquitoes do not constitute a climate trend. They constitute a data point in the story of global trade and species dispersal. Attributing every such event to climate change risks trivializing both science and journalism.

Real ecological studies from Alaska, Canada, and Svalbard demonstrate that mosquitoes can thrive in Arctic conditions that make Iceland seem mild by comparison. Their success depends on water availability, not climate change.

So when the next headline declares that “climate change has come to Iceland — and it’s biting,” it might be worth remembering: sometimes a mosquito is just a mosquito, and sometimes, the story got there by cargo plane.