This story originally appeared on Inside Climate News and is part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
It can carry life-threatening diseases. It’s difficult to find and hard to kill. And it’s obsessed with human blood.
The Aedes aegypti is a species of mosquito that people like Tim Moore, district manager of a mosquito control district on the Western Slope of Colorado, really don’t want to see.
“Boy, they are locked into humans,” Moore said. “That’s their blood meal.”
This mosquito species is native to tropical and subtropical climates, but as climate change pushes up temperatures and warps precipitation patterns, the Aedes aegypti—which can spread Zika, dengue, chikungunya and other potentially deadly viruses—is on