An open letter to mosquitoes.

Dear Mosquitoes,

I read on the Internet that you guys only live for 12 days, so I'll keep this short: you're busy arthropods with places to go and people to meet. I just hope I'm not one of them. Your representatives have been to my house several times in the past week and I'm not at all happy with the service I have received. Unfortunately you won't be seeing any of them again because they are now very flat stains on my wall—sorry about that.

As I understand it, the original deal was that you, Mosquitoes Sp. z o.o., take a tiny amount of warm blood from each of us humans and in return we get malaria. It's an odd deal, but I wasn't there are the original meeting so what do I know. I see from our records that a Mr. Ug was Vice President of Contracts at the time and, apparently, he couldn't read… or perform basic cognitive functions. Since we seem to be stuck with this arrangement, perhaps we could at least renegotiate some of the details?

What's with the itching? It's taking up a lot of our time and I don't see how it helps our relationship. If we wanted to be kept awake all night with an irritating skin condition there are numerous other reputable organisations we could go to. I believe we have an ongoing arrangement with Itch, Pimple, Rash and Sons with which we are wholly satisfied. It's not the blood we mind, we've got tons of the stuff, we just don't understand why you have to be so irritating about getting it out. We understand the business with the anticoagulants, but what's so useful about making us scratch like wild dogs?

I don't know who's advising you guys, but a survival strategy that relies on annoying humans is not a winner. We have access to dangerous chemicals and we're not very smart: we will irretrievably poison the planet with carcinogenic pesticides if we think it will get us a good night's sleep. I see from your website that you've been around for 80 million years. Just because we’ve only been on your menu for a couple of million years, don’t think you can push us around.

While we're on the subject of your website, I notice there is a very interesting section entitled "How we find humans." You claim to use carbon dioxide emissions to locate us. If this is in fact the case, can you explain what it so fascinating about our ankles? As far as I know, we do not emit carbon dioxide from our ankles—it pretty much comes from the opposite end of the body. The knees also seem to attract far more attention than their carbon-neutral status would suggest is reasonable. We would like to believe in the carbon dioxide explanation, we could simply give up breathing out for the rest of the summer, but it’s not convincing anybody.

Please reply in writing, we can’t understand you over the phone.

Yours faithfully,

People