No one in the world likes mosquitoes. They bite. They leave itchy spots. They carry diseases ranging from malaria to West Nile Fever which is the Next Big Thing in America, now that anxiety rashes from September 11 and anthrax scares have been shown up to be mere hysteria. Even dogs and birds hate them.

But you know all that. This article is not a defence of mosquitoes but an effort to explain why they exist at all. Everything except the human is there for a particular reason. When humans start tampering with size and distribution, then every creation is disturbed and becomes unnaturally large or small.  So it is with the mosquito.

What good is a mosquito?

About 2,700 species of mosquitoes span the globe from the Sahara to the tropical forests of Brazil. Some like to feed at night. Others prefer morning meals. Many species bite people and animals, using the protein in the blood to reproduce. Some feed only on flower nectar. One species, Toxorhynchites, or predator mosquito, eats other mosquitoes. Unfortunately its range is limited (Probably the only import that I would approve of!)

Historically, mosquitoes have shaped the world’s nations and their wars. But I will deal with that in another piece someday. Suffice to say Napoleon, Alexander, the Nazis and a large number of other world predators were strongly influenced by this enemy. Then, their presence has kept people from wanting to live in some areas. This has left these places as refuges for other wild plants and animals to live.

Entomologists who study mosquitoes have discovered that one good thing male mosquitoes do is eat honeydew. Honeydew is the sticky stuff that covers many trees and the area around them in the summertime. Honeydew is aphid excrement. Think what a sticky place the world would be if male mosquitoes weren't cleaning it up!

Besides blood and honeydew, mosquitoes also eat a lot of plant nectar, which provides sugar as energy for flying. Like bees and other insects, mosquitoes pollinate plants as they collect their nectar. Entomologists have collected mosquitoes whose bodies were covered with pollen grains that could be traced to more than 30 species of flowering plants.

Mosquitoes are probably much more important as pollinators of wildflowers than we have realized. In the Arctic, for example, mosquitoes are the main pollinators of bog orchids.  As waterborne larva, they eat algae and bacteria. Drastically reducing the number of mosquitoes could trigger an increase in the populations of other annoying gnats and biting flies, say pest management specialists. 

But what about the females? After all, it is the females who suck our blood. Well, for one thing, baby mosquitoes make great fish food. In fact, you generally will not find mosquito larvae in places where fish or frogs live. So it's not so much that mosquitoes breed in stagnant water, as you often hear. Rather, they breed (successfully) in water that has no fish or frogs.  Mosquito larvae and pupae are good food for many kinds of fish and insects such as dragonflies. Adult mosquitoes provide food for huge numbers of insect-eating birds and bats. In fact, some people encourage birds like Purple Martins, swallows and bats (Bats eat 600-1,000 insect pests each hour), to live nearby to help control mosquitoes. They’re part of a large food chain. Removing them might not decimate other insect and animal populations, but they'd be sorely missed. The good news is that only 1 out of every 200 mosquitoes survives long enough to reproduce.

But, they can go and be useful somewhere else. How do we keep them away from our homes and gardens? Without chemicals.

You know the standard suggestions: empty all the stagnant pools of water, cover your water tank, get rid of all the water round your home etc. But with so many lakes becoming polluted and so many rivers slowing down because of dams, with so many water bodies full of algae which mosquitoes love, you are still going to get mosquitoes. Here are some suggestions of how to keep them away from you and your home.

Smell is an important sense for mosquitoes trying to find a person or other animal to feed on. Mosquitoe repellents that rely on smell are the best. Citronella candles made from the essential oil of Citronella Grass, a close relative of Lemongrass are very effective. In fact, any strongly lemon-scented herb will work - lemon verbena, lemon-scented geranium, lemon balm etc - and really any strong-scented herb - lavender, rosemary, basil - will also deter them. But first, you MUST release those essential oils, either by rubbing them onto your skin, or by continually rubbing against the plant, or by burning the essential oils. One measly little candle, or one tiny little plant won't serve a large area, so you should have lots of them around your outside living area, placed where people will rub up against them as they walk past. Pennyroyal is one of the mints and has a lovely peppermint flavour.  Its creeping habit makes it an ideal groundcover, particularly in those areas that are partially shaded. It also repels ants and mosquitoes very successfully. Rubbing the leaves of pennyroyal on the skin will also keep mosquitoes and flies away. Mosquitoes will not come too close to a basil or Tulsi plant. Again, these may be planted by the back door or grown in a pot on a kitchen window sill. Brush the plant with the hand every so often, or as you pass by, to release the fragrance which you will enjoy and the flies and mosquitoes won’t. Some people rub catmint on the back of their necks and wrists when they work in the garden. I take the seeds of the Morpankhi plant, as most villagers do, and rub them on the back of my hands. Lemongrass applied on the ankles, wrists and the back of the neck just before dusk keeps them at bay in the evenings. Don't wear perfumes or scented deodorants. Mosquitoes have the same tastes as males!

When I bathe in the morning, just before I finish I pour a mug of water with lemon juice in it or lemongrass tea. Rubbing lemon peel on your skin, and garlic will deter them (and everyone else.)

Indoors, try placing the scented geranium, Pelargonium citrosum Vanieenii, at strategic locations such as near doors and windows. "Vanieenii" has a good reputation for warding off bugs. Many other scented geraniums besides "Vanieenii" also contain Citronella oils which help repel insects. There is a company in Hyderabad which supplies Citroen Geranium to all the nurseries. I once did a TV programme with the owner just to popularise it!

The Nepalese burn a herb called Loban on coal in their houses. Instead of burning something you could make a spray: 3 parts lemongrass (or citronella), 1 part thyme, 2 parts lavender, 1 part peppermint (or eucalyptus),

Mix together in a new plant sprayer (and dilute with water if desired). This mix also has the advantage of smelling pleasant and is safe for use around kids and pets.

Shake the mixture well before using if you decide to dilute it with water.

One of the things that I tried some years ago was to cut an onion into half and put it on my bedside tables on both sides. The mosquitoes did not come but the smell was not thrilling.

Colour is another deterrent. White works best against mosquitoes. Wear light-coloured clothing, as darker colours attract bugs...this is particularly true of blue denim jeans. Many insects are attracted by the colours blue and yellow, so avoid wearing these if possible. Mosquitoes are more attracted to women than to men, or to people who eat a lot of sugar. Always shut the doors and screened windows before dusk. 

In the event mosquitoes were not repelled effectively, many herbs can be used to relieve the itching from bites. Dab freshly washed bites with lemon juice or cider vinegar. Before bedtime, apply lavender oil or cinnamon oil by rubbing on the affected area. As well as helping repel mosquitoes these oils also take away itching from bites.

There are lots of village and local mosquito repellents. Investigate local ancient customs; one tribe, the Karankawas, killed an alligator, skinned him, liquified the fat and slathered it on! Kept quite a few things away, one of which was mosquitoes! Do you have any remedies? Send them to:

Maneka Gandhi – This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

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Three years ago, I stayed in a small village commune called Damanhur in Italy, a place where people had taken retreat under an Italian Guru called Falco. The place and people were fascinating.  Their names had been changed to animal and flowers ones. They made their own houses, grew their own food, created art, made wine and cheese and had received international awards in each one of these things. These are people who want to exercise their moral and creative facilities to their utmost and make the world the beautiful place it should be. Look it up on the Net.

They were experimenting on two things: a machine which allowed us to hear the talk of plants – and they have already patented this and I heard the plants speak/sing myself when it was attached at random to any leaves. The second was to clone meat cells so that people could eat meat without having to kill animals. I saw some of the work they were doing but they have a long way to go.

This year a group of people will meet in Washington for a lunch to change the world. The meal should consist of fried chicken and nothing else, but while it may look like chicken, have the texture of chicken and even taste like chicken, it will never have lived or breathed. Five years ago Peta the US animal welfare group threw a challenge to the world community of scientists. They had until 30 June 2012 to prove they could make "cultured", or laboratory meat, in commercial quantities. The first scientist to show that artificial chicken can be grown in quantity and be indistinguishable from "real" chicken flesh will be awarded $1m.

The challenge has been taken up by a number of people. Damanhur, for one. Mark Post, head of the department of vascular physiology at Maastricht University in the Netherlands for another. Post has been given $300,000 by the Dutch government and by an anonymous donor, to develop his stem cell research. He has claimed he will produce a synthetic beef burger this year. Post cannot win the Peta prize because he is working with beef, not chicken, but he has successfully grown strips of meat a few centimetres long.

US scientist Vladimir Mironov working with a Brazilian meat company has taken embryonic muscle cells from turkeys and successfully grown muscle tissue, but only in very small quantities. Another group of scientists, at Utrecht university in the Netherlands, is experimenting with stem cells harvested from embryos. One stem cell could potentially produce tonnes of meat, with all the stem cells from one cow being enough to feed an entire country.

The research is complex and hard. Scientists say they need much more grant money and the solution is still a decade away. They are confident that tissue-engineered meat will eventually be developed. So far all the meat "made" has been nearly colourless, tasteless and lacking texture. Scientists may have to add fat and even lab-grown colourings. But that is added to real meat as well, as it exists today in fast food joints. The prize of being able to one day grow hundreds of tonnes of meat from stem cells is potentially vast, say animal welfare groups and food manufacturers.

The UN's Food and Agriculture Organisation expects world consumption of meat to double between 2000 and 2050, and the challenge of increasing food supplies with shrinking land and water will be enormous. You cannot feed a population of seven billion people and more on free range meat. There isn't enough space and land to do so. In fact meat consumption is rising in countries such as China and India. The future of the planet depends upon the development of effective meat substitutes. Without it there will be more animal cruelty, more depletion of resources and an increase in diseases such as avian flu.

Cultured meat has the added advantage of requiring far less energy and space to grow. Analysis by scientists from Oxford and Amsterdam last year showed the process will use only 1% of the land and 4% of the water compared with conventional meat. For vegetarians, the prize is less animal suffering.

"More than 40 bn chickens, fish, pigs and cows are killed every year for food in the US alone, in horrific ways. In vitro meat would spare animals from this suffering. I would give the million dollar prize to begin with to Linda McCartney, the late wife of the Beatle Paul McCartney. When she became a vegetarian, she put all her money into inventing foods that tasted, smelt and felt like meat, fish and chicken, but were made from soya and wheat. She marketed them in England under her own name. Hundreds of similar companies sprang up. Today there are thousands of products on the market for people who like the taste and texture of animal flesh but want to avoid animal suffering.

Chinese Buddhist Monks have long made vegetarian beancurd products that get as close as any person should want to the texture of meat, without eating the real thing. In Rajasthan I have tasted a dish made of wheat that tastes exactly like meat and was invented 200 years ago by Rajasthani women who wanted their husbands to be vegetarian.

If Peta succeeds, Ingrid Newkirk its head and the inventor should both get a Nobel Prize because this will be the single most important invention since electricity. It will save resources like land and water, it will remove suffering, it will allow the forest to grow back and the Earth to cool again, and it will stop the use of pesticides and antibiotics on animals and through them to us. It will make the earth a happier place. If any Indian scientist succeeds I will give Rs 1 crore to him/her.

Maneka Gandhi

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If I told you that the life of your child depends on the life of a butterfly you might laugh. But it is true. Butterflies are a vital and unique part of the life support system. What will happen if butterflies die out? The survival of life itself is in danger. When they die, the plants die. Then all the insects that depend on these plants die. Then the birds who prey on these insects. Then the trees that depend on these birds to spread their seeds. Then the rain that comes because of these trees. Then the animals who live in these forests. And then man.

Butterflies carry no diseases, nor are they parasites or predators of man or domestic animals. They pollinate flowers and many long tubular flowers cannot reproduce without them. Some butterflies live on the rotting corpses of small animals in the jungle. Butterflies live on diets that vary from mosses to cacti, but each species is limited to a small group of food plants. They eat plant pests like aphids and ants and weeds. In turn, they are eaten by lizards, spiders, birds, bats and monkeys, centipedes, mantids, ground beetles, ants, wasps, toads, tree frogs, lizards and rodents. In fact, many of the smaller insects would die if the butterfly died.

The death of butterflies means a decrease in the numbers of their predators and parasites and an increase in their prey. In the process, the flowers and habitat are destroyed, birds and other insects lose their food and the entire ecosystem is thrown out of gear. It used to take thousands of years to destroy a species. Nowadays we do it in less than ten. Many butterfly species have already become extinct along with the plants that they fed on. There were thousands of species in India . Now there are less than a thousand left in India and, of these, another hundred are on the brink of extinction.

What are the reasons for the reduction in the numbers of butterfly species? The first is the destruction of greenery.  Most species are concentrated in the tropical and forest areas. These are disappearing in India at the rate of ten football fields a minute. The second is pesticides. DDT, Malathion and the dozens of other pesticides, that are used so carelessly in India, don't only kill 30,000 human beings a year from direct poisoning, they have killed off entire species of plants, birds and insects that is vital for man's survival. Not just the soil gets poisoned, but the small bodies of water that sustain so much life also get toxic with pesticide. The third is the greed of collectors. About a thousand pinned specimens of the Copper Butterfly are found decaying in museums but the living creatures has gone forever, destroyed by the year 1848 by collectors.

Butterflies from India are taken abroad by people who come on tourist visas and smuggle out the insects. Recently, two German nationals were caught smuggling out a consignment of butterflies. There were four big cardboard cartons which contained about 18 small plastic boxes. About 15,000 butterflies and moths were packed in them, including about 600 rare and endangered species. They were being taken to be sold abroad.

Dealers come to India and encourage the local people to capture them, but the methods are so crude that for every perfect specimen, at least 1000 are thrown away because their wings have been crushed. For every single butterfly of a rare species smuggled out, the local people capture thousands of butterflies of unwanted species and throw them away as well. Our Himalayan butterflies are being killed by tourists posing as nature lovers and the many plants they pollinate are now endangered by this international trade estimated to be worth a hundred million dollars. Species of rare Swallowtail butterflies found only in high altitude areas such as Talang La, Bara Lacha and Rohtang, fetch several hundred dollars in the international market and are being systematically plundered year after year.

From the Northeast, Sikkim and the Andaman islands, these butterflies are taken to Hongkong, Japan, Germany, UK, Taiwan and Singapore and either sold to collectors or mounted as jewellery and sold to tourists. But we too are to blame. The government's Guwahati handicrafts shop is selling dead butterflies made into wall paintings. There is a large insect fair in Hamburg every year. At this fair which is heavily attended, thousands of Indian butterflies and moths are shown for sale. Our Indian Ambassadors go regularly to this fair and the Indian government is well aware of it. Not one person has questioned how the butterflies got there. Start complaining. Maybe letters to the police, the ambassador of Germany, the Prime Minister and Home Minister of India could be the first step. Not just India, but Bangladesh, Nepal and Bhutan are equally well represented - the “eco-tourists" are busy with their nets in all these hapless countries.

The destination of living butterflies which earn several million dollars are the private collectors or the so-called `butterfly houses' in Japan, Europe, and the USA. Trade is flourishing in various parts of India. Sikkim, northeast India and Andaman & Nicobar Islands are major places for commercial collection. The butterfly trade had proliferated into a thriving business of $200 million due to the ever-inflating butterfly price. Thanks to the demand and high prices, smugglers have developed a network in the Northeast, which is home to more than half of the country's 1400 species of butterflies including  rare ones like the Atlas moth (which is now on the brink of extinction) of the Khasi Hills, Meghalaya.

In fact, our government gives permission for people to catch butterflies for `scientific work'. A large number of these find their way to commercial collections or butterfly houses. Now the Government of India’s department of biotechnology is spending crores of rupees to make butterfly zoos in Bangalore where butterflies will be brought from all over – which means thousands will be killed on catching – and they will live for only a few days as their plants will be alien. Some bureaucrats hatching this mad scheme will get rich in the building process – who cares what will happen to India.

Butterflies are caught with a net and put in folded paper flaps in which they can live for 15 days. They are then injected with a chemical that keeps them stiff but alive for two months, packed into envelopes and sent abroad to be killed later by having a nicotine-poisoned pin driven through their bodies. They take some time to die, fluttering their wings till the end.

Our Himalayan flowers are dying out because the butterfly collectors have reached there. When butterflies die, the pests that they eat increase and the farmer is threatened. Those who benefit by having their pests eaten by caterpillars and their crops enhanced by cross pollination are hurt. The ecosystem that sustains us is being thrown out of gear. The theft of butterflies from the Himalayas has serious implications for the preservation of biodiversity. In the absence of honeybees at high altitudes, the swallowtail butterflies play a key role in pollination of plants. The collection of these butterflies is a threat to high altitude Himalayan flora.

There is a great demand of Indian butterflies, moths and pupae in foreign countries. There are also many websites that are helping persons in this illicit trade. Butterflies, particularly those belonging to the families Papilionidae and Saturnidae, are more in demand. Chinese medicine thinks of both families as having medicinal value contrary to any scientific opinion!

How can we protect them? Some people propose commercial farming. But most butterflies don't breed in captivity because each sub-species depends on specific flower nectar.

So, instead, we should create butterfly reserves where they are left alone. You must report people who kill them. Tourists going to our mountains and Sikkim should be checked carefully. You must report people who kill the butterflies. Customs and the post office should check every parcel going abroad as thousands of butterflies are sent this way. Stop hanging dead creatures in your house and report shops that sell butterfly plaques. Nature lovers should be taught to appreciate the hobby of butterfly watching and photographing them, not catching them with butterfly kits. Stop these useless zoology departments in colleges from encouraging their students to get hundreds of dead specimens of butterflies to make them into “albums”. Write to the governments of Assam and the Andamans and tell them to stop killing and selling butterflies officially. Entomologists who think nothing of killing as many insects as they need in order to show what great researchers they are – even if they never achieve anything except mouldy collections of dead bodies - should not be allowed.

Maneka Gandhi

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During the last election my car stopped at a railway crossing and I saw a man tossing a yellow downy chick from hand to hand like a ball. I got out of the car, snatched the chick (did something else unmentionable) and put her down on my lap. I took her to my bedroom and fed her. In two days the chick had grown so smart that she followed me everywhere and sat on the rim of the bucket when I bathed. 

She hated me reading and would peck at my glasses. She wanted to be carried up and down in the cusp made by my hands until she slept.  If we left her alone in the room, she shouted till someone came in. And she was the hugest ant eater – chasing and eating upto 100 a day! At some point she discovered my full length mirror and talked to it, admired herself, strutted up and down before it. The mirror became her companion. Did she recognize herself or did she think it was another person?

She knew it was her. All my dogs look into the mirror. They study me standing behind them and when I lift my hands or make a weird movement they respond without turning around. So, if they recognize me, I am sure they know who they are too. It’s just that they pay as much attention to their mirror images as I do – a casual glance as we pass by.

This mirror test, or self recognition test, was taken very seriously by scientists in order to determine whether animals are intelligent or not. Self awareness, according to the psychologists, means a sense of who the being is and who carries out actions. This sense is important in social interactions, moral reasoning, consciousness, responsibility, desire and development. These abilities give humans the sense that they are entities separate from the external world, and allow them to interact with other agents and the environment in intelligent ways.

Charles Darwin held a mirror to a zoo orangutan and noted that he made a series of facial expressions. But Darwin said he could not make out whether the animal had recognised himself or thought the mirror was simply another toy.

In 1970 George Gallup at the State University of New York, Albany, re-enacted Darwin's initial experiment with four wild young chimpanzees. First, each chimpanzee was put into a room by itself for two days. Next a full length mirror was placed in the room for 80 hours in varying distances from the cage - starting farther away and moving closer. Their behaviour was recorded.

At first the chimpanzees made threatening gestures at their own images. However, after a while, the chimpanzees realized it was a reflection and used it to examine parts of their bodies (as we do) and make faces.  Then Gallup surreptitiously marked the animal with two dye spots. The animal saw the spots in the mirror and identified them with its own body by turning and adjusting the body in order to better view the marking in the mirror, or poking at the marking on its own body while viewing the mirror.

Even children, who are introduced to mirrors first, think it is someone else. In fact most humans fail the mirror test until they are about 18 months old (I still do – I refuse to believe this fat person staring at me is me).  So do people who have been blind from birth but have their sight restored.

Humans with autism, schizophrenia, Alzheimer's disease and developmental disabilities also fail the self awareness test. Tests on pigs showed that they could understand the mirror and use its information - they were able to find a bowl of food hidden behind a wall using a mirror. But the scientists insisted that they could not recognize themselves. This seems foolish.

Pigs are the smartest of all animals and if they could recognize other objects in the mirror it seems unlikely that they had no idea of themselves. They probably didn’t fall all over with amazement – as we don’t. Researchers have come to the same conclusion about dogs. About Dogs? Animals that are so totally aware of themselves? 

Birds have been dismissed as ‘birdbrains” who attack their own reflections. Scientists used this test for years to establish a "cognitive divide" between people and animals “like us” – meaning the apes and every other being on the planet. But Luis Populin a professor of anatomy at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, proved in September 2010, that rhesus macaques who were supposed to be non-self aware recognised themselves. The macaques explored their own body even standing upside down to see difficult areas.  A macaque will respond to another monkey by adopting an aggressive or submissive posture. These monkeys showed no such reaction to their mirror images. (Rhesus monkeys, being unaware of themselves supposedly, have been used extensively in research. Humans have sent them into space, cloned them and planted jellyfish genes in them).

Now, the question arises:  If rhesus monkeys are able to recognize themselves in the same way that humans can, then they probably have a similar understanding that they are entities independent from the environment. Should they be used so brutally?  The finding casts doubt on both the relevance of the mark test and on the existence of a definitive cognitive divide between the “higher” species and the “lower” ones.

It was argued that only the higher species like dolphins, apes and elephants were self aware. But, in 2008, the ability was found in magpies - a species with a brain structure very different from mammals and without the neocortex in the brain that is considered the centre of self awareness.  In the same year Keio University scientists showed that pigeons are able to discriminate and have self-cognitive abilities higher than 3-year-old children who have difficulty recognizing their self-image. Not only that, pigeons can discriminate people’s photographs from others and discriminate paintings of a certain painter (such as Van Gogh) from another painter (such as Chagall). So the scientists are back to square one – to find other tests in which they can prove animals are stupid and humans are not. It becomes easier to experiment on them and to eat them.

Maneka Gandhi

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