Beth Shapiro

The wind is blowing.

Then the wind dies down.

And then it's like, oh, fuck.

Like, this is awful.

There was a moose that was ahead of us for a while.

And this poor animal, we were following the river.

And he would every few steps, he would just totally submerge his body in this frozen water and then come back up like the mosquitoes are just, yeah, something else.

It's terrible.

In time era, I remember we would walk along the grass, this tall grass with little flowers in it, exactly the kind of place you can imagine mammoths roaming and being like the kings of the universe there.

But as you were walking, you would kick up the grass and they would just emerge off of the needles of grass.

It was just really awful.

Yeah.

And I learned, actually, because I was curious about this.

How do they survive if there are so few red blood—because mosquitoes mostly, they only take—it's only the females that take a blood meal, and they only take a blood meal when they're making eggs or making a brood.

They take it to reproduce.

Otherwise, they feed on nectar.

So how do these how does so many mosquitoes survive in the Arctic if there's so few animals there?

And it turns out those mosquitoes are adapted to this climate and they don't need a blood meal to reproduce, but they do better if they get one.

So they're after you, but they don't need you.

Whoa.