Jack Tame: The world’s deadliest creatures have reached the last country on Earth

Saturday Morning with Jack Tame

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9d ago 4:06

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It was such a rookie mistake.

I was tramping in the Kahurangi, last summer. The Douglas Range, 1000m above sea level. And after we’d pitched a tent, as the sun got heavy and the surrounding hills cast their shadows long and deep, I realised I’d screwed up, big time.

Zzzzzz. Zzzzzz. Zzzzzz.

What made the error so much worse was that it wasn’t a bit of absent-minded forgetfulness. I’d carefully considered my options before loading my pack. It wasn’t that I’d forgotten to bring long johns or pants. It’s that I’d *chosen* not to pack them. Up top I had a poly-prop, jumper and jacket. But down bottom I had shorts… and that was it.

Zzzzz. Zzzzzzzz.

The only way to keep sandflies from biting is to keep moving. And the last thing you feel like doing after 8 or 10 hours of steady climbing… is keep moving. As if to wallow in my own stupidity, I ended up treading a middle ground. Moving just enough so as not to rest, but not enough to stop the sandflies from completely devouring me.

Still, I’ve had worse experiences with them. I’ll not forget my night at the mouth of the Heaphy River, where the swarms were so thick they hung in the skies like pockets of buzzing black smoke. Walking by, you had to make sure to close your mouth so as not to catch a bit of extra protein.

And you know what? I’d still take a sandfly over a biting gnat. I once chose to visit one of Utah’s national parks on a Sunday in the middle of biting gnat season. The locals call them ‘moose flies’ which I suppose could be cos’ they hang around moose, or just as feasibly in my experience because the gnats are a comparable size. It wasn’t just the itching that killed me, though. My bare legs were soon covered in blood. I returned to Salt Lake City to discover every pharmacy closed for the rest of the weekend and spent the night lying in a tepid bath, trying to stave off shock.

Often it’s the obvious downside to natural beauty. If it’s a beautiful natural landscape… there will be something that’ll give you an itchy bite.

At least there’s one place on Earth you could still safely wear shorts.

Sure, you might be a bit nippy striding down the streets of Reykjavik in your stubbies, but at the very least you could be sure there were no sandflies. There were no biting gnats. No midges. No moose flies. No mozzies.

That was at least, until this week.

Scientists have confirmed that for the first time, the World’s deadliest creature has reached the last country on Earth. Iceland officially has mosquitoes.

And while sure, Iceland is not the Amazon. They’re not at risk of a Dengue Fever outbreak, You can still safely leave the Deet at home.

The truth is that the discover probably represents more than just an ecological quirk.

At an individual level, sure, it’s a potential nuisance. But what confirming mosquitoes in Iceland says about the state of the planet is probably far more serious.

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