Three *Culiseta annulata* mosquitoes caught on a red-wine-soaked rope at Kiðafell in the Kjós valley on the night of 16 October 2025 mark the first wild mosquitoes ever recorded in Iceland. The species is a cold-hardy nuisance biter and has not been tied to human outbreaks in Europe.
For most of the twentieth century, an Icelandic schoolteacher could end a geography lesson with a small national boast: this country had no mosquitoes. Not because of luck. Because of arithmetic. Iceland's mild summers never gave larvae the warm weeks they needed to mature; its freeze-thaw winters drowned eggs in meltwater and froze them out again before they could hatch. The island sat alongside Antarctica in the small club of inhabited landmasses where the world's most consequential insect simply could not get a foothold.
On the night of 16 October 2025, an amateur entomologist in the valley of Kjós, just north of Reykjavík, walked out to inspect a length of rope he had soaked in red wine and hung from a tree. The wine-rope is a traditional, slightly eccentric way of attracting moths. What he found instead were three mosquitoes, two females and a male, clinging to the soaked fibres. Their identification was confirmed within days by the Icelandic Institute of Natural History as Culiseta annulata. Iceland's geography lesson now needs a footnote.
What was actually found, and what it actually means
The specimens were collected by Björn Hjaltason, an insect enthusiast who found them on a farm in Kjós, just north of Reykjavík. The Icelandic Institute of Natural History confirmed the identification and said this was the first record of wild, free-flying mosquitoes in Iceland.
The species matters. Culiseta annulata, the "banded mosquito", is unfussy, cold-hardy and ubiquitous across northern Europe and the British Isles. It is not the disease-carrying tiger or yellow-fever mosquito of the public imagination. C. annulata is a nuisance biter; it has not been tied to human outbreaks in Europe. It is also unusually well-suited to surviving the kind of climate Iceland actually has. Unlike most British mosquitoes, Culiseta annulata remains active through the year in all life stages and does not enter diapause, which lets it overwinter successfully. They do not need the climate to thaw at the right moment. They need a sheltered site and an unsealed window.
That is the small, almost domestic detail that makes the finding consequential. Iceland's classic objection, "our winters will kill them", does not apply to a species that stays active right through the winter.
The Institute said the three mosquitoes most likely arrived by freight. Containers, used tyres, garden plants and ornamental flowers are the usual freight-borne pathways for Aedes and Culiseta species worldwide. Iceland's import volume has grown materially since the 2010s, and Kjós sits within commuting distance of both Keflavík airport and the country's larger industrial ports. The mosquitoes did not have to swim.
The climate signal, what is fair to say, and what isn't
It is tempting, and not entirely wrong, to read this finding as a climate story. It is also possible to overstate it.
Warming temperatures, increasing freight traffic and shifting insect-dispersal pathways may be combining to allow species previously excluded from Iceland's cold climate to gain a foothold. If anywhere in northwestern Europe was due to lose its mosquito-free status, it was Iceland.
But the honest position is more nuanced. Three specimens collected by one person on one rope in one garden in one valley do not establish a breeding population. The species could, on present evidence, already be widely distributed in southern Iceland and waiting only for someone to look. Equally, the three could be the entire population, a final cohort, blown in on a freighter, that will not survive the next bad winter.
What is not in dispute is that the climate envelope that historically excluded mosquitoes from Iceland has shrunk. Whether this particular invasion sticks, another one will follow. The question has moved from "if" to "when" to "by how many species."
Iceland's previously unique status had become, in entomological circles, a slightly nervous distinction. The Icelandic Institute had been monitoring for years, in expectation of exactly this finding.
What this changes, and what it doesn't
For Icelanders, the practical implications are modest. C. annulata is a nuisance, not a public-health emergency. It bites, but it does not carry the diseases that Aedes mosquitoes carry. Bed-net manufacturers should not expect a surge of orders in Reykjavík next summer.
For the rest of us, the cultural shift is the news. For as long as it has existed, the global mosquito map has had an asterisk against Iceland. The asterisk is gone. Antarctica is now the only place in the world believed to have no mosquitoes. That is a tidy, melancholy fact, and worth sitting with for a moment.
For policy, the lesson is procedural rather than dramatic. Iceland's customs and biosecurity inspection regime has been calibrated to a country that did not have mosquitoes. The Institute's recommendations to the Ministry of the Environment will, in practice, ask whether that calibration is still appropriate, particularly for second-hand tyre imports, ornamental plant shipments and the kind of low-frequency container traffic where inspection has historically been light. The answer is almost certainly that it is not. Culiseta annulata may be the species that gets in first. The next arrival is more likely to be one that matters more.
The Mosticare lens, quietly
The reason this story has travelled so far in the global press has very little to do with the specific risk posed by Culiseta annulata. It has to do with the symbolic punctuation. For thirty years, scientists have been describing climate change in graphs, ranges, probability bands and contested attribution statements. This is a story that can be told in one sentence: Iceland used to have no mosquitoes; now it has three.
The lesson for European readers further south is not to panic about Iceland. It is to take the same procedural honesty Iceland's Institute is now taking. The species moving into northern Europe in this decade, Aedes albopictus, now established in 16 European countries and 369 regions, Aedes japonicus, reported in Belgium and the Netherlands, and West Nile virus, which now circulates every season in Italy and Greece, are not insects or viruses that any of these countries dealt with thirty years ago. They are here. They are reproducing. And the institutional reflex to call them "exceptional" is itself becoming exceptional.
Three mosquitoes on a wine-soaked rope is not, in itself, an emergency. It is a moment to update the map.
What we know
Sources cited
- Phys.org. "Mosquitoes reach Iceland for the first time as the Arctic heats up." April 2026. https://phys.org/news/2026-04-mosquitoes-iceland-arctic.html
- Arctic Portal. "Iceland, a mosquito-free Arctic nation no more." https://arcticportal.org/ap-library/news/3975-iceland-a-mosquito-free-arctic-nation-no-more
- NPR. "Iceland reports the presence of mosquitoes for the first time, as climate warms." 22 October 2025. https://www.npr.org/2025/10/22/nx-s1-5582748/iceland-mosquitoes-first-time
- Earth.com. "Scientists confirm that mosquitoes are now living in Iceland for the first time ever." https://www.earth.com/news/mosquitoes-have-been-discovered-living-in-iceland-for-the-first-time-ever/
- European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control. "World Mosquito Day 2025: Europe sets new records for mosquito-borne diseases." https://www.ecdc.europa.eu/en/news-events/world-mosquito-day-2025-europe-sets-new-records-mosquito-borne-diseases
- European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control. "Aedes japonicus factsheet." https://www.ecdc.europa.eu/en/disease-vectors/facts/mosquito-factsheets/aedes-japonicus
- European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control. "West Nile virus: historical data." https://www.ecdc.europa.eu/en/west-nile-fever/surveillance-and-disease-data/historical
- UK Health Security Agency / GOV.UK. "Native mosquito species profiles." https://www.gov.uk/guidance/mosquitoes-species-profiles