SPEAKER_02 0:34

There is growing concern about the Zika virus.

SPEAKER_01 0:36

With seven cases reported in New York, doctors are warning about travel to Puerto Rico, Mexico, Brazil, and other countries. It's especially concerning to expecting parents.

SPEAKER_06 0:47

That's actually terrifying. I remember when Zika was everywhere in the news.

SPEAKER_07 0:50

Yeah, and that was recent, like 2015, 2016, and the mosquito responsible for it is still out there, still biting people, still spreading disease. When we think about the mosquitoes that affect us, we're mainly thinking about anaphylace, which is the malaria mosquito, Culex that spreads the West Nile virus, and ATIS, specifically ATIS agypti, is responsible for dengue, yellow fever, and the one that really made headlines in the last decade, Zika.

SPEAKER_06 1:21

It led to a huge epidemic, being especially horrific for pregnant women. Babies were being born with severe neurological conditions like microcephaly, where a baby's head and brain develop much smaller than expected, often leading to lifelong developmental challenges.

SPEAKER_00 1:34

Last year, the virus was detected in the Americas, where it is now spreading explosively. The level of alarm is extremely high.

SPEAKER_07 1:46

What's interesting is that mosquitoes themselves are not technically the disease. They're vectors. They carry viruses and parasites from one body to another. Okay, so how does that actually work? When a female mosquito bites someone, she's feeding on the blood to get the nutrients she needs to produce eggs. Before she feeds, she injects saliva into the skin. That helps keep your blood from clotting, which is also what causes the itchy bump afterward. But if that mosquito previously bit someone infected, she can pick up a virus or parasite from that blood. That pathogen can survive inside the mosquito, and then the next time she bites someone, she can pass it directly into their bloodstream. So the mosquito is basically acting like a tiny flying syringe? Honestly, yeah. That's what makes them such effective disease spreaders. They're not creating malaria or dengue or Zika, they're just transporting it.

SPEAKER_06 2:33

I don't know if this fact really redeems mosquitoes to me. Especially when they're biting me.

SPEAKER_07 2:38

And that is what makes them so effective at this. Mosquitoes are actively tracking us. Every time we exhale, we release CO2 and mosquitoes sense it. Some scientists say they can detect our exhale from half a mile away. And then as they get closer, they use body heat and chemicals on your skin like the lactic acid and ammonia from your sweat. So they can literally sense us breathing and feel our heat? Yeah, and some people are a lot more attractive to mosquitoes than others. The composition of our skin from our sweat, how much CO2, and even the color of our clothing, mosquitoes are more drawn to darker colors like black, red, navy blue, especially once they've already picked up on your CO2. Okay, so now I have to rethink my entire wardrobe too? Honestly, maybe. Maybe start wearing a lot more khaki. But one of the most concerning things is that pregnant women are especially vulnerable. Pregnancy increases body temperatures and carbon dioxide production, which makes pregnant people easier for mosquitoes to detect. That's so scary, especially knowing what happened during the Zika outbreak. Yeah, and it's supposed to only get worse.

SPEAKER_02 3:40

The nonprofit research group Climate Central found that 173 cities around the country are seeing more days of prime mosquito weather.

SPEAKER_06 3:49

Mosquitoes are now spreading into places where they historically could not survive because temperatures are warming. There are now reports of mosquito-borne illnesses appearing in areas that previously had little to no exposure. So this is becoming a bigger problem, not a smaller one.

SPEAKER_07 4:01

Yeah, which is why scientists have spent decades trying to figure out how to fight back. So, what was the first major scientific strategy? Basically, chemical warfare. Scientists and governments started using pesticides and insecticides to kill mosquitoes at a large scale. One of the most famous examples was DDT, which later became widely used during the mid-20th century.

SPEAKER_06 4:24

Wait, isn't that the chemical from Silent Spring that Rachel Carson book?

SPEAKER_07 4:28

Yes, so Silent Spring came out in 1962, and it basically exposed what DDT was actually doing to the environment. So what was it? How did it work? DDT works by attacking the nervous system of the mosquito. It causes the nerves to misfire, leading to muscle spasms, then paralysis, and then death. It was a dirt cheap and incredibly effective. Mosquito populations dropped dramatically, and malaria rates fell in some regions. Public health officials called it one of the biggest victories in disease control history. So at first it looked like science really found an answer. But the problem was that DDT affected more than just mosquitoes. It stayed in the environment for a long time and built up in food chains through something called bioaccumulation. Smaller organisms absorbed it, larger animals ate those organisms, and the concentration kept getting higher and higher up the food chain. And that's where the environmental damage started showing up? Exactly. One of the most devastating effects was on bird populations. DDT was thinning eggshells, making them so fragile that they would break before the chicks could even hatch. It was solving one public health problem while quietly creating another ecological crisis. And that's exactly what Rachel Carson was documenting.

SPEAKER_06 5:35

She famously described a future silent spring, a spring season without a bird song, because so many birds have been wiped out by chemical exposure. That image really stuck with people.

SPEAKER_07 5:45

It did. The book completely shifted public perception and eventually led to DDT being banned in the US in 1972. But the chemical mosquito control didn't just disappear with it.

SPEAKER_06 5:55

Right. So we started looking into this, and the infrastructure built around mosquito control is honestly crazy. So you have the CDC and state and local mosquito control districts, county programs, and the World Health Organization all running their own operations. And what's wild is how many different chemicals they've developed to tackle mosquitoes at different stages of their life cycle.

SPEAKER_07 6:14

Yeah, and the first strategy they landed on was something called larvacide. This targets mosquitoes while they're still in their aquatic stage, before they can hatch and start biting people. Scientists would treat ponds, storm drains, marshes, and other standing water with chemicals like methoprene, which prevents larvae from developing into adults. Others use BTI, a naturally occurring bacteria that kills mosquito larvae more selectively. So the benefit there was stopping the problem before it even started? In theory, larvaciding was a smarter, more targeted solution. It could reduce mosquito populations without spraying chemicals everywhere. But it was also labor-intensive. You have to find and treat every breeding site, and mosquitoes can breed in incredibly small amounts of water, even in something as small as a bottle cap. So if you miss a few sites, the mosquitoes can just come back. Exactly. That was one of the first big lessons scientists learned. Mosquito control was not a one-time fix. It required constant surveillance and maintenance. And then there was adulticide, right? Yeah, picture truck-mounted spraying systems driving through neighborhoods, releasing fog into the air, or planes spraying large areas from above. A lot of those sprays used chemicals like permethrin or sumithrin, which are synthetic chemicals that attack the mosquito's nervous system, kind of like how DDT did. Sounds kind of dystopian. It can definitely feel that way, but there were benefits. Adult suiciding could reduce mosquito populations really quickly, which was especially important during outbreaks, when public health officials needed immediate action. But I'm guessing the downside was that it wasn't just hitting the mosquitoes. Exactly. That was the trade-off. These chemicals could also affect other insects, including pollinators like bees and butterflies, and sometimes even aquatic systems if runoff contaminates nearby water. And over time, scientists ran into a huge problem: resistance. So like antibiotic resistance, but for mosquitoes? Yep. Mosquitoes reproduce really quickly. So when some survive chemical exposure because of genetic mutations, those survivors pass that resistance on. Over time, entire mosquito populations became less sensitive to the very chemicals designed to kill them. So scientists keep having to adapt too. That was one of the biggest lessons from all of this trial and error. Chemical control could work, sometimes really well, but it was never permanent. Mosquitoes adapted, ecosystems were affected, and scientists started realizing that trying to out chemical mosquitoes might not be enough.

SPEAKER_06 8:39

Which is kind of the pattern we keep seeing in the story. A scientific solution works initially, and then the consequences start showing up later. Also, I can't imagine that people were very happy getting their neighborhoods sprayed with even stronger chemicals.

SPEAKER_07 8:51

Yeah, beyond the science, there were also huge social and political consequences. One of the biggest criticisms of mosquito spraying programs is that communities often do not get a say on when or where or even if it happens. Especially with aerial spraying. Exactly. During disease outbreaks, governments can authorize emergency spraying over neighborhoods very quickly. And residents may not even know it's happening until planes or trucks are already outside. And there's a really clear example of this. During the 2016 Zika outbreak, Miami-Dade County authorized aerial spraying of a pesticide called nailed over the Wynwood neighborhood in Florida. There was no community vote, no neighborhood meeting, it was just done. That's insane. Like you have no say over what gets sprayed over your own home. None. And nailed isn't a light chemical. It's similar to DDT in the way it works by attacking the nervous system. The EPA itself says people should stay indoors with windows closed during spraying and keep kids inside for at least four hours after. But those warnings only help if you actually know when it's coming. So communities are just expected to deal with it after the fact? Pretty much. And that's not a one-time thing. That's just how these emergency programs are designed. Speed is prioritized over consent. That's so scary. Especially for communities worried about chemical exposure.

SPEAKER_06 10:07

I've seen a ton of lawsuits that have been tied to mosquito spraying programs. One example involved Duke Energy's mosquito control efforts around Lake Watery in South Carolina. Residents argue that spraying and chemical contamination harmed the environment and affected property and public health concerns. And I feel like these impacts are not equally distributed at all.

SPEAKER_07 10:25

Yep, lower income in marginalized communities are often more heavily exposed to industrial spraying or chemical pollution.

SPEAKER_06 10:32

That's true. Research by Nathan Donnelly and others have found that biomarkers for harmful pesticides showed up in the blood and urine of black and Mexican Americans at levels five times higher than white Americans. Five times higher.

SPEAKER_07 10:45

So when we say marginalized communities bear more of the burden, that's not just a feeling, but measurable, and it's in people's bodies.

SPEAKER_06 10:52

And even though pesticides reduce diseases in some cases, they also create entirely new environmental and ethical problems.

SPEAKER_07 10:59

Yes, which is why scientists eventually started looking for alternatives that seem more targeted and less destructive.

SPEAKER_06 11:09

Okay, now we get to the part that honestly sounds the most like science fiction.

SPEAKER_07 11:13

Yeah, genetically modified mosquitoes. This is probably the closest scientists have gotten to engineering mosquito populations at the genetic level. One of the biggest companies involved in this is OxyTech, a biotechnology company that developed genetically modified Aetis agypti mosquitoes. And these are the mosquitoes that spread Zika, dengue, yellow fever, all of that?

SPEAKER_03 11:35

Mm-hmm.

SPEAKER_07 11:35

The idea behind OxyTech mosquitoes is actually kind of fascinating. So back in 2002, OxyTech scientists inserted DNA sequences from two completely different organisms, a bacteria called E. coli and the herpes simplex virus, directly into the mosquito's genome. And together those sequences create what's called a self-limiting gene. Wait, herpesimplex? Like the virus? I know it sounds insane. They use CRISPR Cas9 to target a specific DNA sequence in the mosquito embryos and inserted the new gene directly into the genome. But what it does is that it produces a protein that jams the mosquito's own developmental process. So any offspring that inherit it die as larvae they never make it into adulthood? Yeah. And the way they keep the mosquitoes alive in the lab is by feeding them tetracycline, an antibiotic that switches that gene off. Once they're released into the wild with no tetracycline, that kill switch turns back on for the next generation.

SPEAKER_06 12:31

So basically, the goal is population collapse, killing out entire families of mosquitoes before they can ever grow up. Exactly.

SPEAKER_07 12:38

Only male mosquitoes are released because they don't bite humans. Female mosquitoes are the ones that feed on blood. The scientific logic is pretty straightforward. If enough modified males are released, fewer mosquito offspring survive. Over time, the local mosquito populations drop dramatically. And scientifically, it worked pretty well, right? Yeah, in field trials in Brazil, OxyTech reported a reduction of more than 80% in local ATIS egypti populations in some release areas. And that's huge because they're incredibly difficult to control using traditional chemical methods. So compared to chemical pesticides, GM or genetically modified mosquitoes were marketed as more precise. Instead of spraying toxic chemicals across entire ecosystems, scientists could target one species very specifically.

SPEAKER_06 13:24

It sounds so amazing, but is it too good to be true? I'd imagine people would be pretty skeptical about the solution.

SPEAKER_07 13:32

You're not wrong, especially in places like the Florida Keys, which deal with a big mosquito and Zika problem. In 2020, the EPA approved the release of hundreds of millions of genetically modified mosquitoes in Florida, and the backlash was intense. Over 200,000 people signed petitions opposing the release.

SPEAKER_06 13:50

I remember reading about this too. A Time magazine investigation found that locals say that they got little to no input on the process. One resident, Russo, put it pretty simply. There were also questions about whether the science even held up long term. Some researchers pointed to OxyTech's 2013 to 2015 trial in Brazil, arguing that the male's effectiveness dropped after about a year and a half because wild females were starting to stop mating with the modified males.

SPEAKER_07 14:58

The science was still actively being debated while the release was already approved and happening.

SPEAKER_06 15:03

And meanwhile, Time reported that some residents were only learning about the release as it was already underway. Like they woke up one day and it was already just happening.

SPEAKER_07 15:12

Which is exactly the problem we keep seeing. The decisions get made and the communities find out after the fact. And that sums up the ongoing issues with trust.

SPEAKER_03 15:22

Mm-hmm.

SPEAKER_07 15:22

A lot of the opposition was not necessarily anti-science. It was about governance and power without consent. People felt like local communities were excluded from conversations about technologies that directly affected their neighborhoods and health.

SPEAKER_06 15:37

Which honestly keeps coming up throughout this entire story. It always becomes political too. Tell me more. So, during the Zega outbreak, one of the biggest fears was that pregnant women infected with the virus could give birth to babies with congenital Zika syndrome, including conditions like microcephaly that affects an infant's brain, making it smaller and more susceptible to intellectual disabilities, intellectual delays, seizures, and movement issues. And because of that, women across Brazil were suddenly being told to avoid pregnancy. Which sounds impossible if you don't have access to contraception. That was the contradiction. The government was telling women to delay pregnancy, but many women, especially poorer women, did not have reliable access to contraceptives, reproductive health care, or even basic public health support. And abortion was and still largely is highly restricted in Brazil. So suddenly, hotlines and advocacy groups were being overwhelmed with women seeking information about abortion access, legal exceptions, and emergency reproductive care.

SPEAKER_07 16:41

So the mosquito was not just spreading disease, it was exposing all of these existing inequalities.

SPEAKER_06 16:47

Exactly. Women with more money often had more options. They could access private health care, better mosquito protection, or even travel for reproductive care. But lower-income women, especially those living in areas with higher mosquito exposure, were taking on so much of this risk.

SPEAKER_07 17:03

So the burden was non-distributed equally.

SPEAKER_06 17:06

Not at all. And that's what makes mosquito-borne illnesses such a social issue. It's not just a scientific one. It raises the questions about who gets protected, who has the resources to respond when things go wrong.

SPEAKER_07 17:18

Wow.

SPEAKER_06 17:19

And even scientifically, GM mosquitoes still were not a perfect solution.

SPEAKER_07 17:23

True. Reducing mosquito populations does not automatically eliminate disease transmission. Mosquitoes reproduce incredibly quickly. They migrate between regions, and ecosystems constantly change. So maintaining control often requires releasing mosquitoes over long periods of time.

SPEAKER_06 17:39

So even this hyper-advanced technology still doesn't fully solve the mosquito problem?

SPEAKER_07 17:45

No, there are many caveats. It brings up moral questions on whether humans still have the right to wipe out an entire species.

SPEAKER_06 17:51

And there are environmental concerns too, with this idea beyond the moral implications.

SPEAKER_07 17:56

Yes, scientists still do not fully understand what happens when a mosquito population is heavily suppressed or eradicated over decades. Some researchers argue that eliminating or collapsing a species population could affect food chains, pollination systems, and ecological balances in unpredictable ways.

SPEAKER_06 18:14

So, even though GM mosquitoes were more technologically advanced than the pesticides, they still carried some of the same ethical problems.

SPEAKER_07 18:21

They were still based on this idea that humans could dominate nature through increasingly powerful technologies. And over time, some scientists started moving towards a different framework entirely. Instead of asking, how do we eliminate mosquitoes? They started asking, what if we could make mosquitoes less dangerous without trying to wipe them out completely?

SPEAKER_06 18:40

So, if pesticides created all these problems, and GM mosquitoes came with a lot of opposition, what was the next step?

SPEAKER_07 18:50

Scientists shifted towards biological control methods. One of the biggest examples is bacteria. Bacteria? How can bacteria be our solution to all these problems? Well, Wolbachia specifically is the bacteria in question, and it gets pretty interesting. It's a naturally occurring bacteria found in many insects. Scientists introduced it into mosquitoes because it interferes with the viruses inside them. And here's the wild part. They can observe that it works, but they still don't fully understand why.

SPEAKER_06 19:19

Wait, they're using a public health tool and they don't know how it works?

SPEAKER_07 19:23

Pretty much. The leading hypothesis is that Wolbachia and viruses like dengue and Zika are competing for the same resources inside the mosquito's cells. So the virus just can't get a foothold. Another idea is that Wolbachia activates the mosquito's own immune system to fight off the virus before it can replicate. Scientists are still figuring out which one it actually is.

SPEAKER_06 19:44

So the mosquito is still out here biting people, but something inside it is blocking the virus. So that's so strange. How do you actually get Wolbachia into all these mosquitoes?

SPEAKER_07 19:55

Wolbachia lives inside the cell itself, and it gets passed from mother to offspring through the egg. When an infected female lays eggs, the bacteria is already in there. So it just spreads through reproduction? Exactly. And Wolbachia has this trick where if an infected male mates with an uninfected female, those eggs don't hatch. But an infected female can mate with anyone and her eggs survive fine. So over time, infected females have a reproductive advantage, and that bacteria spread through a whole population on their own.

SPEAKER_06 20:24

Wait, I don't really understand. Why aren't we doing this everywhere? Isn't this the final solution?

SPEAKER_07 20:30

Well, there are a couple of reasons. Firstly, it's not permanent. If the population of mosquito crashes and comes back without Wolvachia, then scientists need to keep re-releasing it. It also works best in contained areas, so large cities with complex ecosystems are hard to target. And it doesn't guarantee that viral transmission is zero. It just greatly reduces it. And lastly, community trust. Trust again? Well, yeah, you're still releasing these mosquitoes into people's backyards. Even if the science has been perfected, it can be a hard sell.

SPEAKER_06 21:03

And I'm sure there were a ton of marginalized communities that are super skeptical of those scientists showing up with bugs and having little to no control.

SPEAKER_07 21:11

Yeah, like I said earlier, there are no silver bullets in this story, especially the Brazilian public who hold some strong feelings about mosquitoes. We interviewed Dr. Luisa Reyes Castro from the University of Southern California, who has researched Wolbachia mosquitoes in Brazil. Here's what she had to say.

SPEAKER_04 21:29

I think sometimes they just they didn't really it was hard to kind of give the message that like now mosquitoes were not gonna be killed because he has been killed for so long, right? How kind of embedded in Brazil the idea of killing mosquitoes is. Like we learn in school, in biology classes, one of the things we learn is how to kill mosquitoes. Like the kids are saying, like, oh, but I kill mosquitoes. I just say no. We're not actually not gonna try to kill them. I think people who when they explained the Volbecia, there was this kind of they didn't really know how to grasp this idea that you know mosquitoes were now gonna be tools, but not really, because you can't differentiate between mosquitoes, so they still be killable, right? So I think there was that was this kind of yeah, this ambivalence was very hard to kind of have people make sense of.

SPEAKER_06 22:25

There is a barrier that this Wolwakia initiative needs to cross in people's minds before it can be accepted as a solution.

SPEAKER_07 22:32

Yeah, and after seeing mosquitoes as The enemy for generations, it's hard to view them as anything other than that. And Wolvachia programs require serious funding, infrastructure, and long-term maintenance, so the ability to implement this is uneven globally.

SPEAKER_06 22:47

And even where it is available, people still have to trust it. Scientists are literally releasing mosquitoes into communities and asking people to believe that they're there to help. That's a hard sell when those communities already have reasons to distrust outside researchers and public health agencies.

SPEAKER_07 23:03

Especially when a lot of these programs are being implemented in the global south.

SPEAKER_06 23:08

Exactly. A lot of Wolbachia trials have happened in countries like Brazil, Indonesia, and other places that are dealing with the highest burden of mosquito-borne disease. And while these communities can absolutely benefit from the technology, there's a bigger question of power. Who gets asked for consent? Who gets to define what counts as an acceptable risk?

SPEAKER_07 23:27

Right, because even if the intention is disease prevention, people can still feel like they're being experimented on.

SPEAKER_06 23:34

And community engagement has become a huge part of Wolbachia programs because scientists realize they can't just rely on biology. They need public meetings, education campaigns, outreach, and local support for the releases to be successful.

SPEAKER_07 23:48

So science alone is not enough.

SPEAKER_06 23:51

Yep. For something like Wolbachia to work long term, you need both biological success and social trust. And honestly, I think that's part of why some scientists see it as a better direction. It's not just about controlling the mosquitoes, it's about working with the communities too. Our guest, Dr. Race Castro, also had some interesting thoughts about this too.

SPEAKER_04 24:13

In Brazil, it's a disease that affects both rich and poor. So it's a disease that when I accompany the kind of health workers, sometimes like really wealthy houses, they have pool and they have bathrooms that nobody uses. Those can become breeding spots as well. The argument is that everyone can be affected by it. If a wealthy person gets sick with dengue, they can just take a week off. If it's a low-income person and they have to continue working, and they're, you know, like even though they're mighty feeling horrific pain. So I think the solution is so it's it's by changing the broader structure in which certain people, when they get sick, they don't have they get excess, others don't. The solution will only come from these more structural kind of uh changes, right?

SPEAKER_06 25:11

Okay, so we have chemicals, GMOs, and bacteria. Is there anything else that scientists are looking into?

SPEAKER_07 25:18

Actually, yes. There's a new possible solution that was found March of 2025, which discovered that people who were taking this drug, nitisinone, for their rare metabolic disorders, were considered mosquito suicidal. Whoa. So they would get bitten and their blood would kill the mosquito? Exactly. Essentially, the scientists found this enzyme, for hydroxyphenylpyruvate dioxygenase, or HPPD. Say that five times fast. But this enzyme is still part of the tyrosine detoxification pathway that all arthropods need to digest blood. This pathway in humans is a supplementary pathway for brain function and emotional hormones. But in mosquitoes, their entire lifespan depends on how quickly they can degrade and detoxify the tyrosine from their human blood meals. So when physicians were giving niticinone to their patients with tyrosine degradation, they noticed that their blood would be lethal to the mosquitoes.

SPEAKER_06 26:13

So, do you think further solutions are going to be changing us rather than the mosquito itself?

SPEAKER_07 26:19

That's a real possibility for the future. The only reason that niticinone isn't as big is because of its side effects. Increased levels of tyrosine in the blood can cause so many issues in the eyes, skin, and liver that many people are even seeing if the risks outweigh the benefits.

SPEAKER_04 26:35

I mean, Band-Aid solutions can improve like make things a little bit less worsen. Yeah. But I mean, in Brazil, it's very different than in the US because we do have bigger public health. So these interventions are all being made by the government. There's another version of the Vomecan Volbec and Mosquito that you can buy and put it in your factory. So let's say now you are you are a wealthy person, right? So you actually own like a big factory and you have you want to protect your workers because if they get sick, you they don't go to work for you. So you you owe you it's kind of a private solution for a public health problem. That's a different way to implement, which is not public health, it's very privatized. As I mentioned, right? It becomes a different way in which these inequalities are reinforced. In a place like the US, where public health is not as finalized as in in other places, I think that might become those developing the solutions or promoting it, right? Because they also need to make money.

SPEAKER_07 27:36

This is an uncomfortable conclusion. We really don't have an answer. Scientists have to continue to look into these solutions and perfect them. But similar to Dr. Ray's Castro, we have to think about the ability to coexist and understand that not every person will have access to these new technologies.

SPEAKER_06 27:52

And unfortunately, climate change means mosquito species are moving into zones where they've never been before. So the people who will be hit next are exactly the people least prepared for it.

SPEAKER_07 28:02

Which is why the real question isn't just elimination or coexistence. It's how do we do either one more equitably and who gets to be part of that conversation?

SPEAKER_06 28:11

So I came in here hating mosquitoes, and I'm leaving, hating them in a much more complicated way. They were striving for coexistence even before all of this scientific trial and error.

SPEAKER_07 28:42

The idea that humans can eliminate mosquitoes is a very modern, very Western framing. Much of Western science portrays mosquitoes as something to be eliminated, but many indigenous perspectives were more about coexistence. Mosquitoes were understood as part of the environment, even if they were dangerous. And there's one Hodoshone story that really stuck with me: a tribe in the northeastern woodlands of the U.S. I will tell you the story about why we have mosquitoes.

SPEAKER_06 29:10

One day, they say two giant mosquitoes arrived by the river. They say the Indian people paddled down the river in their canoes. When giant creatures would bend their heads and attack them. The people began to avoid using this stream. After this, these giant mosquitoes began to move somewhere else to seek their prey. Finally, the day came where a war party was organized to seek out those giant mosquitoes and to destroy them. The warriors shot their arrows. A terrific battle took place. Though it seemed like the mosquitoes came from everywhere. In a while, half of the warriors that fought had been killed. The remaining warriors refused to give up. They were singing their song till their very death. Then, they had used up almost all of their arrows. So, then the giant bodies of those mosquitoes fell onto earth, and their entire bodies were covered with wounds. From the blood of those giants came a lot of little mosquitoes. And so, just like their grandfathers, they like the taste of human blood. They hate humans for killing their grandfathers. So that's why they hunt us, for revenge over what we've done to their ancestors. That's how mosquitoes came to be.

SPEAKER_07 31:10

Exactly. Throughout this entire story, mosquitoes have forced humans to ask questions far beyond the realm of science.

SPEAKER_06 31:16

And what it really means to live alongside something that can harm us. So maybe this isn't just a story about mosquitoes.

SPEAKER_07 31:24

No, it's a story about how humans respond about a war that was never meant to end.