FIRST OF FOUR PARTS
Before Western contact, Hawaii had no mosquitoes, meaning the insects are not a necessary part of the ecosystem. They are merely pests and disease-carriers.
By historic accounts, the first mosquitoes arrived aboard the American whaling ship Wellington, which anchored off Lahaina in 1826 with contaminated water casks. Soon after, Native Hawaiians complained of an insect that sang in their ears at night.
That was almost certainly the southern house mosquito, Culex quinquefasciatus, which later became a carrier of the avian pox virus and avian malaria, much to the detriment of Hawaii’s lowland birds. Native forest birds continue to survive high on mountain slopes, where cooler temperatures keep mosquitoes at bay, but greenhouse warming might someday breach that refuge.
"We do worry that mosquitoes in Hawaii will start becoming more cold-tolerant and move upslope into the last refuges of the native birds," says Daniel Rubinoff, director of the University of Hawaii Insect Museum.
That wouldn’t require evolution, a centuries-long process, he says. "This is a gradual process using genes already present in the species — not generation of unique species."
Today there are eight species in the isles, but only six bite humans. They include the Asian tiger mosquito, Aedes albopictus, a vector for dengue fever that was implicated in an outbreak on Maui in 2001; the yellow fever mosquito, Aedes aegypti; the inland floodwater mosquito, Aedes vexans nocturnus; the bromeliad mosquito, Wyeomyia mitchellii; and the Japanese mosquito, Aedes japonicus, another dengue carrier.
Culex and A. vexans are nocturnal. Culex also is a known carrier of heartworm in dogs.
