All around us are snakes, scorpions and many kinds of insects, some of them venomous enough to kill with a single bite. The mosquito is one of them: the bite of this tiny insect can bring life-threatening dengue, malaria and chikungunya.

People are hit hardest by these mosquito-borne diseases in the rainy season, and countless people die of them every year. But did you know there is a country in the world with no mosquitoes at all? It has no insect pests or snakes either. The country is Iceland.

Iceland's neighbours, Norway, Denmark, Scotland and even Greenland, have plenty of mosquitoes. Only Iceland has none. Mosquitoes cannot adapt to Iceland's weather and get no real chance to breed in its lakes, because the lakes freeze completely three times a year.

More curiously, mosquito remains are preserved at the Icelandic Institute of Natural History museum. According to The Telegraph, Antarctica and Iceland are the two places on earth where the troublesome insects have never been able to settle.

Most homes use electric liquid vaporiser machines to keep mosquitoes away, and many people use repellent machines such as All Out or Good Knight. In tropical countries people are advised to use mosquito nets every night to avoid mosquito-borne disease. In Iceland none of this is needed.

There are no snakes in the country either. Snakes cannot live where water and land are extremely cold, which is why there are none in Iceland: as a cold country, it is a place where snakes cannot survive. Scientists often release snakes in such countries for experiments, and they are still researching whether snakes can survive in these ice-covered lands. That research, however, failed within a few days.

Sources cited: Curly Tales, CNN.

Source: Jagonews24. First published in Bengali on The Agro News.