Hello and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish,
a weekly podcast coming to you from four undisclosed locations in the UK.
My name is Dan Schreiber, I am sitting here with Anna Tyshinski,
Andrew Hunter Murray and James Harkin and once again we have gathered round the microphones with our four favorite facts from the last seven days and in a particular order here we go.
Starting with you, James.
Okay, my fact this week is there is only one mosquito in Iceland.
Poor lonely mosquito.
How'd it get there?
Well,
we think it maybe came over from Greenland on a plane
because it was found in the 80s by a guy called Professor Gisleymar Gisleysen from the University of Iceland and I wrote to Professor Gisleysen and he wrote back and he said he boarded a flight at Keflavik airport in 1986 in June and the plane had come over from Greenland and it was making a stop in Iceland and it was going to Germany and he was walking down the passenger cabin and he saw this mosquito and he thought what's that doing here and he's
like I need to catch
that mosquito and so he legged it along the aisle chasing this mosquito and he managed to grab it and then he was going to work at Karlsruhe at the University for three months but he had this mosquito and he knew it had to go to Iceland so he kept it for three months.
Had he killed it by this point?
It was dead.
I think it probably died when he grabbed it so he then kept it in his room in this University for three months and then when he came back to Iceland he gave the specimen to the Icelandic Institute of Natural History.
They put it in some alcohol and they kept it behind the scenes as this one Icelandic mosquito but and this is where it takes a Dan Brown kind of twist.
In 2016 the New York Times interviewed him and asked him about this single mosquito and they went to look for it in the Institute of Natural History and they can't find it so we know
that it exists.
We know it's in Iceland somewhere but we don't know exactly where it is.