Biting Words

As a female, you have six weeks to reproduce, while your male mates have about one week.

Plant nectar provides a certain amount of energy, but as you prepare to create the next generation, a big, warm, and endlessly nourishing form of food comes bumbling through your habitat.

Indeed the mosquito’s ability to transmit deadly diseases has inspired significant concern and fear throughout human history. 

Interestingly, only female mosquitoes spread diseases such as Zika virus, West Nile virus, dengue, yellow fever, and malaria to humans.

This is because only female mosquitoes have the needle-shaped proboscis necessary to puncture skin and draw blood.

In the 19th century, both malaria and yellow fever proved incredibly deadly for the U.S. population. Warm summers provided ideal conditions for the proliferation of mosquitoes and the diseases they carried.

But connections between disease outbreaks and mosquitos were not scientifically confirmed until the 1890s. 

As this map depicts, mosquito-borne malaria remained a problem in the United States as late as 1946, particularly in the South.

As the connection between mosquitoes and serious diseases was made more explicit through medical research, modern nations increasingly attempted to eliminate the insect through the widespread use of pesticides.

This goal was achievable, in part, due to the growth of industrial chemical firms, which began to purify organic pesticides for commercial use and produce new (and increasingly deadly) synthetic pesticides.

Used liberally in both the Mediterranean and the South Pacific, DDT allowed the U.S. Army to avoid great losses to insect-borne diseases like malaria and typhus.

For this reason, the pesticide was pitched as a weapon that could win the war against both the Axis nations and the insects that plagued humanity.

DDT kills insects by disrupting the sodium channels in their nerves. 

When an insect comes into contact with DDT... 

...it keeps their sodium channels open, thus allowing prolonged electric impulses to travel across nerve membranes…

...and ultimately causing the insect’s nervous system to fail.

Nevertheless, DDT proved incredibly effective during the war due to its low cost, great persistence, and ability to kill a variety of insects.

Despite uncertainty about DDT’s effects on other lifeforms, the pesticide became a common tool for American agriculture in the 1950s.

Over the following 30 years, around 1,350,000,000 pounds of DDT were used in the United States.

Recognizing the sheer power of DDT to eradicate insects on farms and in homes, pesticide manufacturers retained their wartime rhetoric to market their products.

Given DDT’s ability to reduce human exposure to deadly insect-borne diseases, this aggressive language maintained a certain level of credibility.

As DDT was repackaged for use in the U.S. household, it was pitched as yet another post-war technology that would bring about new levels of comfort and cleanliness.

While post-war advertisers proclaimed that DDT was easy to use and safe for the household, they continued to depict and laud its deadly effects.

Consequently, World War II imagery mixing racialized hatred with environmental fears often bled into cultural depictions of insects.

The hatred and fear of insects even transcended the glossy domain of advertising. Insect and insect-inspired enemies became a trope of 1950s American pop culture. 

Serialized science fiction and pulp stories like The Savage Swarm (1957) featured insects as mankind’s greatest threat. Yet the most widely disseminated example of this cultural trend was the “Big Bug Movie.”

As Americans in the 1960s and 1970s increasingly advocated for a holistic view of environmental balance, insects gained greater recognition for their important role in the maintenance of ecosystems.

By 1972, the Environmental Protection Agency banned the agricultural application of DDT. Nevertheless, the widespread use of other pesticides continues to this day.

Mosquito-borne diseases remain a serious and life-threatening problem in many parts of the world.

For this reason, humanity’s tense relationship with the mosquito will likely continue and pesticides will remain an important tool in the complex balance of human and animal life.