THEY get a buzz out of ruining our summer days. A blight on our pleasure too small to smite, the midge bugs the hell out of us.
If only, we sometimes think, they could be a little less aggressive and reconsider their distasteful habit of dining on our blood.
Well, rejoice: conservationists on an estate near Loch Ness have discovered a northern midge that does not bite.
Lest that sound as likely as a garden bird that declines to tweet, let us hear straight from the conservationist’s mouth: “I am sure this non-biting midge has been here all along,” says Alan Watson Featherstone, founder of Trees of Life, “just nobody has noticed it before, partly because there are few people who could identify small invertebrates like this midge.”
One such person is entomologist Peter Chandler, who discovered Chironomus vallenduuki, to give it its Sunday-best name, and whose find brought the number of UK biodiversity firsts found at Dundreggan Conservation Estate to 11. But, of these, C. vallenduuki must surely be the most pleasant, a beast that we would happily pat on the head, unlike its ghastly fellow aviator, Culicoides impunctatus, who is far too feisty with his mandibles ever to earn our undying affection.
Still, it might be invidious to dream of breeding her (female more deadly and so on) out: life’s rich tapestry and all that.
Memories of a good walk ruined might cause some to contemplate the possibility of dubious cloning and skullduggery with DNA to create an edentulous beastie that we send on its way with a vegetarian cookbook.
But that would not be the midge that we know and hate.
Besides, we already knew of other midges, generally furth of the Highlands, that are less inclined to strap on a bib as soon as they see us coming.
In the meantime, the advice for avoiding puncture by C. impunctatus remains: either stay indoors or venture forth reeking of optimistic repellent, with one hand bearing a portable hair-dryer and the other a pet bat on a lead.
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