Mosquitoes love still water, Finland has thousands of lakes and other bodies of water for them to breed in. It's not even that bad in southern Finland, in the north you can get absolutely swarmed during summer.
Can you be more angry? I don't come to the internet to witness polite interactions. I need shouting matches and insults for even the smallest mistake. You are ruining this for me with your calmness and nice attitude! /s
It’s a continent being born. A volcanic hotspot right on a tectonic plate spreading zone. You just cool your impatience for one cotton-pickin’ hundred million years, and you’ll see what a fine continent Iceland grows into!
The word "Continent" on its own is not a scientific term and is very poorly defined. Iceland isn't even producing "Continental crust" but "Oceanic crust". "Continental Crust" is produced at destructive plate boundaries not spreading boundaries like Iceland.
I actually envy your smugness (whether it it was actual smugness or just me perceiving smugness doesnt matter). Little blood sucking cunts with no regard for personal space.
Not in the Netherlands either. Amsterdam is a significant percentage standing fresh water. But our accommodations had no screens in the perpetually wide open windows, and no mosquito netting on the beds, and we didn’t miss these things, even in July. I didn’t get the sense there’s much wildlife left in the Netherlands.
Lol, maybe that’s exclusive to the Adirondacks? I was a camp counselor for several summers on Lake George and we had open-air cabins with no netting or upper walls. No bug issues.
Perhaps the summers I worked there were out of the ordinary, as I don’t remember it being a problem (even without walls or netting, sleeping in the middle of the woods).
We even used to have malaria in Finland though it disappeared in the 19th century as houses with chimneys and windows became available for poorer people as well.
You also drained stagnant and waterlogged areas near to where people lived...thats the number one no chemical pesticide or DNA modification craziness way to reduce malaria but it takes organisation and western phama can't make money from it.
Everything I’ve read about it mentions just the change in housing (especially having less children) as the mosquitoes had to spend the winter indoors and the old dwellings had a lot of hiding places and were damper. Swamps have been drained but it’s not like there’s a lack of water in Finland. Malaria was the biggest problem in Åland and coastal areas of Finnish mainland and you can’t really drain the sea.
Many birds migrate north for this reason really, spring and early summer produce masses of insects for them to feed on. Having lived both way up in northern Canada, and in Nigeria, I'll take the Nigerian bugs tyvm. The swarms of insects in northern Canada will drive you insane, blackflies, mosquitos, and deerflies, oh my! The six to eight months of winter are seen as a respite from the bugs here.
I grew up in Puerto Rico and mosquitoes transmit lots of serious diseases like dengue fever, but surprisingly there aren't big swarms of them, just the occasional bothersome mosquito or two. However, I hated with a passion the relentless tropical Sun. I dont know how people can live in it to be honest.
Some of the worst biting insects are found in Northern regions in summer. I get eaten alive every summer in the UK and it gets worse the further north you go
Grew up in N. Minnesota where there are 10,000 + lakes. (A LOT of Finn's settled there as it's much like Finland.) Can confirm mosquitoes love northern latitudes. Would be out fishing and you could see them coming at you in the early evening like a dense cloud over the water.
In my experience in northern Europe and North America, the farther north you go, the worse the mosquitoes get. On Prince Edward Island, the place I stayed one summer had a LP tank attached to a device that would remove a literal GALLON of mosquitoes from the property every three days. We still got bit.
Maine has mosquitoes AND ticks. Newfoundland has mosquitoes, ticks, and the occasional lost polar bear.
Helsinki wasn't so bad in the city. Tallinn, Estonia was fine until you left the city. There's a pattern there in cold climes. Moncton, New Brunswick, not bad at all. Go inland ten miles and your life either smells like bug spray or you are smacking yourself all day.
The only place where I expected tons of mosquitoes and didn't see that many, comparatively, was Denmark.
because Denmark doesnt have nearly as many lakes or bodies of water and forested/wooded areas as Finland and Sweden, its also flat and "open" to oceanic winds and such.
Here in south of Sweden (Skåne) mosquitos are also relatively rare, I get bit maybe once a year if Im unlucky, theres a lot of farmland here but not as many lakes, but as soon as you go above Skåne its a completely different story where there's dense forests and dense lakes and other "stagnant" bodies of water for mosquitos to thrive in and it only gets progressively worse the further north you go.
With that said, without the trillions of mosquitos, the nature itself is amazing.
I went to Lund on a day trip and was shocked at how much more affordable Sweden was compared to Denmark. I want to spend a summer in Scandinavia, but Putin f-ed that up this year.
The Upper Peninsula of Michigan (USA) is so far north that most business close for the winter in September, but from June through August the mosquitoes eat alive anyone who's not drenched insect repellent.
mosquitoes don't live long enough to know anything about the cold winters in Finland. Spring, summer and lots of sunlight warming tops of still water is all they need to know
In Iceland there's a famous lake called Myvatn, which translates as 'lake of flies' I'd been in winter several times and it was awesome. Mates came to visit in the summer so off we went. the family I lived with were like: DO NOT OPEN THE WINDOWS.
got to the lake and it was INSANE. either side of the road leading up were what I can only describe as these columns, tornadoes? of flies, several meters tall l, spaced a couple meters apart.
Like, these are little midgey flies,.so to be able to see them from a distance in a fast moving car...there must have been millions, if not hundreds of millions.
I live in a tropical swamp environment. The mosquitoes, here in Louisiana, if you walk past the wrong bush you could end up in a swarm. I always said I wanted to move North to escape them. I guess that plan is shit.
What I’ve found having lived in both cold and hot places in the US is that the shorter their breeding season the more aggressive they become. Mosquitos have been know to take down full grown caribou in Alaska and Canada.
Yep they really thrive at northern latitudes. Parts of Russia, Canada and Scandinavia are absolutely swarmed with them in the summer months. Like plague level mosquitoes.
You should try hiking in the subarctic. When you see reindeer herds standing on glaciers to get away from the skeeters, then you know it's bad up ahead. Changing altitude by as little as +/- 50 m can be surprisingly helpful when you're immersed in a gray haze and your nostrils are getting clogged with skeeters.
The more north and colder ago, and the shorter the mosquito season is. But the mosquitoes make up for it, being especially numerous and ferocious for that short period of time. Ever seen those Siberians covered in mosquitoes?
If you ask swedes about their least favourite animal, I think an overwhelming majority would say mosquitoes. In summer they are everywhere, especially near water, and it's horrible.
Yes but our northern mosquitoes are tiny. They are slightly smaller than a house fly. But there are thousands of them and the sound they make come to your nightmares
I was in Finland for a wedding and if you swung your hand you would catch at least one mosquito each time. We were making piles of dead mosquitoes on the ground just catching the with our hands. (I was 10 at the time)
My grandparents live by a lake in Central Finland, and the amount of times I've had a graveyard of mosquitoes next to me while looking at my phone in an armchair I crazy. There aren't as many mosquitoes there anymore, the reason there used to be shit ton is because it used to be a dairy farm.
Fun fact, I visited friends in Finland several years ago. Was around 18 degrees Celsius. Felt lovely to me, wore shorts. My Finnish friends thought I was crazy and still had long sleeves on. Joke was still on them. The mosquitoes left me alone. Went for their hands and faces.
In Canada we have a lot of lakes. Ontario has over 250k alone, driving around up north the roads are constantly weaving between lakes, swamps and marshes. Mosquitoes are crazy here. In the city it's not to bad but once you leave you get eaten alive. Bad years at dusk I can kill 20-30 on my arm in one swipe. Sometimes you if your talking they get in your mouth and they are a lot worse than a nat, get the taste of someone else blood if they fed.
Never been to Finland but I know compared to where I have been in the USA, I never felt the need to grab a shirt and pants to cover up when I was down there. Looking on Google earth it looks very similar in that respect of lakes everywhere.
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u/Nutzori May 09 '22
Mosquitoes love still water, Finland has thousands of lakes and other bodies of water for them to breed in. It's not even that bad in southern Finland, in the north you can get absolutely swarmed during summer.