Coexisting with the Unloved Other:
Human-Mosquito Encounters in Gardens in Heidelberg
Geva Herlyn, M.A. Anthropology, Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg
Abstract: Climate change and global human mobilities allow species to spread to parts of the world that they would otherwise never have reached. One of these species is Aedes albopictus, also known as Asian tiger mosquito. In 2015, it was introduced via motor traffic to Germany and consequently to the city of Heidelberg. Populations established themselves apace, especially in allotment gardens. Scientists are concerned about their spread, as the mosquito is a carrier of viruses such as dengue and Zika and also negatively affects humans due to its aggressive biting behaviour. During my interviews with gardeners, the topics of mobilities, climate change and disease emerged. Somewhat surprisingly, the gardeners did not conclude that the tiger mosquito should be eradicated, but rather considered adaptation and coexistence.
Teddy bear left behind on a bench at the Himmelswiese © Geva Herlyn
Introduction
In 2015, Aedes albopictus, also known as Asian tiger mosquito, first hitchhiked via motor traffic from Italy to Germany, and thus to the city of Heidelberg in southwestern Germany. Climate change and global human mobilities allow these mosquitoes, as well as many other species, to reach many parts of the world that they would otherwise never have reached. Asian tiger mosquito can easily adapt to new habitats, which makes them “ecological generalists” (Lucati et al. 2022) who can establish themselves apace in Heidelberg, particularly in allotment gardens. Scientists are worried about their spread because the mosquito carries viruses like dengue and Zika and has an aggressive, daytime biting behaviour that negatively impacts humans (ECDC 2016).
Over several summers I carried out ethnographic fieldwork in an allotment garden area in Heidelberg to explore human-mosquito encounters and investigate how gardeners perceive the tiger mosquito and which attitudes they have towards it.In a total of 21 interviews, 27 people were surveyed, including 10 women and 17 men. Among the gardeners, 5 were under 50 years old and 5 were over 70 years old. The remaining 17 gardeners were between 50 and 70 years old, making this the most represented age group in the allotment gardens. Many of the gardeners have a migration background, some of them of German origin, as many from the older generation have a migration history of German minorities from Eastern Europe and came to the region as children or young adults. For 16 participants, the background was either unknown or German. The participants reside in Heidelberg and neighbouring towns. Many of the interviewed individuals live in rented flats without their own gardens and belong to the working class. The reasons for leasing an allotment garden range from the lack of a private garden, general interest in gardening, the desire for a recreational place in the greenery, to self-sufficiency. The participants’ gardening experience ranges from 1–3 years to 30 years or more, as some gardens have been passed down within a family from generation to generation for decades. In the interviews, mobilities, climate change and disease were among the most prominent topics. Somewhat surprisingly, the gardeners did not see eradication as the solution; instead, they favoured adaptation and coexistence.
Entrance gate to the allotment garden area © Geva Herlyn
The Schrebergarten: Where Humans and Mosquitoes Meet
The site of my fieldwork is an allotment garden area (Schrebergarten) where the tiger mosquito feels at home. On the edge of a residential area, numerous allotments are situated next to each other, accessed through a gate named Himmelswiese (“sky meadow”). The site is closed at night and no one resides there. People visit after work and on week-ends to escape from garden-less city flats and everyday life. Originally attractive to the working class (Paetzelt 2022; Pinheiro 2010), allotment gardens are now popular among a wide range of people seeking for this green microcosm in the crowded and asphalted city life. The plots share the same layout and yet are designed uniquely—as different as the biographies of their owners. These gardens are considered typically German, reflected in the image of its occupants as being tidy, rule-abiding and stuffy. But they also offer space for more-than-human encounters, co-becomings of plants, animals and people in shared infrastructures (Ginn 2016; Haraway 2008; Hitchings 2003). With its over 180 tenants, many of whom share diverse migratory backgrounds, the Himmelswiese reflects the complexity and diversity of German society. Every spring, the site awakens to new life with gardeners planting various fruits and vegetables. In front of small garden cabins, people rest in a deckchair surrounded by carefully maintained flowerbeds, children in paddling pools, frogs in small ponds and friends at barbecue nights.
This is where the Asian tiger mosquito feels at home and seems to bring menace to this German urban paradise. There are rain barrels and small containers such as flower pot saucers, watering cans or children’s toys on the properties in which rainwater collects. As the mosquito females prefer small, artificial bodies of water for egg deposition and rely on proximity to humans for their blood meal, they find ideal conditions for living and thriving (ECDC 2016; Dusfour and Chaney 2022). The ability of the eggs to survive cold and dry periods in diapause allows the species to establish itself in temperate zones (Lucati et al. 2022). However, given its tropical origins, increasingly mild winters and hot summers due to climate change benefit its further establishment. With its aggressive biting behaviour, it follows gardeners relentlessly and, unlike native species, also during the day, which has ruined many family afternoons in the garden.
Humans and mosquitoes have lived in entangled worlds since the beginning of history, rendering them “mankind’s deadliest foe” as a vector for pathogens (Spielman and D’Antonio 2001; WHO 2020). Human-built infrastructures for the circulation of people and commodities are often shared with a number of stowaways. Between continents, Aedes albopictus travels in used car tyres and ornamental lucky bamboo, spreading through these entangled mobilities and shared infrastructures from Southeast Asia to America and Europe since the 1970s (Lucati et al. 2022). Whether ethically controversial or practically inadequate, what attempts to control this “unloved other” (Rose and van Dooren 2011) all have in common is that there has not yet been a miracle cure (cf. Giraud 2021, 41; Webb 2022; Shaw, Robbins and Jones 2010). In Heidelberg and surrounding areas, mosquito control companies, instructed by the state government, make extensive attempts to contain their establishment such as applying the biological agent Bacillus thuringiensis israelensis (B.t.i.), releasing lab-bred sterilised male mosquitoes, monitoring with ovitraps and educating communities (ICYBAC 2022). At the entrance to the Himmelswiese, a sign warns visitors of the species’ presence. Regular visits of Heidelberg’s “mosquito fighters” involve handing out flyers, checking breeding sites in gardens, and treating stagnant water with B.t.i. They also educate people to take preventive measures themselves, such as emptying standing water, covering rain barrels and using B.t.i. tablets.
Ovitrap for monitoring the mosquito population © Geva Herlyn
Perception of Aedes albopictus in the Context of Mobilities, Climate Change and Disease
For the future management of Aedes albopictus in our “shared world” (Beisel and Wergin 2022), it is important to understand how people directly confronted with its presence perceive the mosquito. This is why the Himmelswiese with its garden owners constituted a perfect location for investigating human-mosquito encounters. The interview participants were as diverse as the gardeners of the site regarding their socio-demographic factors. The topics of mobilities, climate change and disease emerged, not as a rationale of a total elimination of the tiger mosquito but a call for adaptation and coexistence.
Gardeners link the spread of Aedes albopictus towards global mobilities of people and goods and a world in constant motion. For them, the tiger mosquito is just one of several invasive species for whose distribution humans are responsible. Knowledge of invasive species and emerging interspecies entanglements are well developed among the gardeners, which is likely due to both their lived experience and coverage in the media. One gardener summarises his perception:
“We’ve been bringing in animals that aren’t native for centuries. You’ve got toads in Australia that don’t belong there, mice on islands where only birds live, and the tiger mosquito here.”
In the context of a globally connected world, the gardeners categorise the tiger mosquito as one of many such phenomena. In this regard, some criticise the media focus on the tiger mosquito because of the danger it poses to humans, as they find the damage to the ecosystem caused by other invasive species more problematic:
“The Asian hornet for example is invasive, so I find them more dangerous than the mosquito, because the mosquito mainly affects humans, but the bees and the other things the hornet destroy are worse, more dangerous than the mosquito.”
The same applies to categorisation in context of anthropogenic climate change and the associated fear of change in the world: “It’s not just the tiger mosquito that keeps me awake at night, it just shows that things are changing in the world and that we will have to deal with things in the future...”
Overall, people put into perspective the danger posed by tiger mosquitoes by emphasising other threats such as climate change, which makes the tiger mosquito appear like just one small piece in a patchwork. They categorise its spread in the wider context of global human mobilities and climate change.
Additionally, the risk of Aedes albopictus as a vector for infectious diseases is not perceived as immediate, but rather as located in a distant future. Even if the thought of serious diseases like dengue makes the gardeners uncomfortable, it seems far away in terms of both space and time. The gardeners I interviewed, regardless of their age or cultural differences, generally share the perception of the German healthcare system as reliable which gives them a feeling of security, whereas they attribute disease outbreaks in the Global South to weaker healthcare provisions. Also, they consider the probability of transmission in Germany to be minimal as long as the diseases in question do not occur here:
“In Germany, there are far fewer points of contact between the mosquito and the disease than in tropical countries. Many factors would have to come together for an outbreak, in 99 out of 100 cases nothing would happen.”
The predominant view in the Schrebergarten thus contrasts with the concerns of scientists who warn that initial transmission and local outbreaks become more likely in the near future, as indicated by an article from the Robert Koch Institute (RKI 2023). The gardeners’ attitudes further illustrate that the perception of health issues is locally anchored and that diseases are usually not thought globally, but rather perceived locally (Nading 2014, 208). The current spatial and temporal distance of these diseases in Germany leads gardeners to perceive them as remote and unlikely to occur.
Typical view in an allotment garden with rain barrels for water collection which provide perfect breeding conditions for Aedes albopictus © Geva Herlyn
Coexistence Instead of Eradication
The perception of the tiger mosquito in the context of mobilities, climate change and disease leads all of the interviewees of the Himmelwiese to the conclusion that the coexistence of humans and mosquitoes is inevitable as they assume eradication to be impossible for various reasons: “You won’t eradicate it, it’s part of us now”, says one gardener who thinks it is already too late. Also, many participants consider the responsibility for the spread of the tiger mosquito to lie with humans and their mobilities and therefore with the individuals themselves, who order goods from all over the world. They therefore see it as a human duty to live with the consequences. Along with this, climate change and people’s ignorance of the effects of their actions are also mentioned:
“It’s not the mosquito that has flown thousands of kilometres here, no, man has introduced it and now we have to eradicate it? No, then we have to own up to our mistakes and avoid it in the future, and that’s where climate change comes in.”
In this context, people sometimes made seemingly contradictory statements. While they perceive humans to be responsible for the spread, on the other hand they categorise the general spread of species worldwide as a natural cycle in which the mosquito has its place and purpose:
“I have to say one thing, it’s nature, it’s the cycle, it’s part of it. And actually, everything has its reason in this animal cycle, we intervene. And if we always think we have to eradicate everything, at some point we will reintroduce it.”
No matter whether human beings perceive the increasing species mobility as natural or not, they therefore could not continually want to eliminate everything that becomes inconvenient; instead, people need to learn to live with the species and adapt. Rose and van Dooren (2011) refer to these troublesome species as “unloved others”, emphasising the need to consider their place in a time of extinction. They believe that “no death is irrelevant” (Rose and van Dooren 2011, 4), much like the gardeners in regard to Aedes albopictus. Nevertheless, the majority of participants are in favour of local control methods with B.t.i. and resort to preventive measures themselves like emptying standing water or covering rain barrels with nets, as moderate containment is desirable to the extent that it enables coexistence:
“I find it a difficult topic, I think fighting it to some extent is perhaps a good thing, but you won’t manage it completely anyway and to be honest I don’t know enough about the extent to which it is perhaps important that these animals exist, I think it’s always a balancing act.”
The desire for nuanced control at a local level is echoed in Ginn’s (2014) observation of the “mindfully” killing of snails in domestic gardens, with the aim of detachment of this “uncomfortable companion” species. With the example of bed bugs, Giraud (2021) writes about unloved species that won’t leave humans’ side and for which new ways of living together have to be found, like one gardener suggests:
“Then we will just sleep with mosquito nets or something, I think that’s the easier way than eradicating something again.”
A gardener couple brings with them lemongrass spray every time they return from Asia: “We have already set up our lives with the tiger mosquito, not as a prophylaxis, but as a reaction to the situation.”
The gardeners of the Himmelswiese share their urban oasis with the Asian tiger mosquito, favouring coexistence over eradication. They place its introduction to Heidelberg within a world-spanning context of global human and more-than-human climate mobilities, in which the tiger mosquito is one of many phenomena. Transmittable diseases are not a major concern due to their perceived spatial distance and low probability. For the gardeners I interviewed, coexistence seems inevitable because it appears too late for eradication. They think that humans have to live with the consequences of their actions regarding global mobilities and climate change. In addition, they believe that species movements are “natural”, and eradication is unjustifiable from either perspective. In total, the interviewed gardeners see the potentials of nuanced control and their adaptation for a life with Aedes albopictus.
Their views align with the authors of the anthology Mosquitopia (Hall and Tamïr 2022) as they assign the unloved other a place in the allotment. While the Schrebergarten landscapes seem as constant as ever, global climate mobilities are taking place, the effects of which reach as far as in the Himmelswiese, creating an uncertain future. The mobilities of humans and mosquitoes are changing in a changing climate, in a constant “becoming with” (Haraway 2008). This fieldwork in the city of Heidelberg illustrates how people of diverse backgrounds in German allotments share concerns about climate mobilities beyond the case of Aedes albopictus and see a need for human action. Despite these challenges, the gardeners remain hopeful—they generously embrace the coexistence with the tiger mosquito.
Himmelswiese area and warning sign on tiger mosquitoes’ presence in the place © Geva Herlyn
My ethnographic fieldwork was conducted as part of the MA thesis, “The Buzz about Entangled Mobilities: Exploring Perceptions and Attitudes towards Aedes albopictus in Heidelberg” that I completed at the Institute of Anthropology of Heidelberg University in 2023. I would like to gratefully acknowledge and thank my supervisor Professor Dr Carsten Wergin for his generous feedback and support. My work is further embedded in the international and interdisciplinary project “Mobile Mosquitoes: Understanding the Entangled Mobilities of Aedes Mosquitoes and Humans in India, Mexico, Tanzania and Germany”, which is generously funded by the Volkswagen Foundation (Grant Number 9B366).