NO ONE really knows when the mosquito first evolved, but it's a safe bet that it predated the arrival of people by at least 100 million years. Back then, when the planet was a sweltering hothouse patrolled by giant lizards, the survival prospects for a dainty winged insect must have looked rather dim. Over the eons, though, evolution managed to match a taste for blood with a talent for extracting it, and the mosquito proved hardier than early handicappers might have expected. When entomologists examined the body of a hundred-million-year-old mosquito preserved in a chunk of amber, they found appendages on it tough enough to pierce dinosaur hide.

It's hard to advocate for the annihilation of a species, but if one were to pick a candidate, the mosquito—which has been bedeviling creatures ever since—would have to top the list. Whiny and dogged, they're Mary Poppins crossed with Typhoid Mary: an annoying,

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pestilential traveler that we can't quite manage to get rid of. Their diseases are grim. Every year, as many as 500 million people become infected with malaria, and close to two million of them die. Thousands more contract dengue, yellow fever, and West Nile virus. After a century of human-versus-bug combat, we're still barely denting this toll.

Even in their nonfatal form, mosquitoes possess a unique capacity to enrage. There are reports of mosquitoes hounding animals until they die of exhaustion, and driving explorers to madness. Whether or not this is strictly true, it's a sympathetic claim. Anyone who has passed a night plagued by a marauding hatch knows something about the limits of sanity.

Spend any time outdoors and this vulnerability becomes painfully clear. A few years ago, when I was 29, I spent a mosquitoey week in western Thailand. I suffered a total of about 20 bites, then returned to Bangkok to catch a flight home. By the time we landed, 14 hours later, I was incapacitated by fever, and my body was covered in tiny red bruises. The virus was dengue, a strain that's considered unpleasant but not earth-shaking. Even so, it took me a month to recover to the point where I could walk around the block without stopping for breath, and I lost half my hair. All because of a mosquito.

After that, I took to following the insect wars like an armchair general. What I learned was this: If we are turning a corner in this fight, it's a strange one. In the past six months, I spoke with one American biologist who was trying to create mosquitoes that didn't salivate at the smell of people and another who wanted to infect the bugs with a fungus that would addle their brains. I learned about one particularly obsessed Canadian scientist who built a set of six steel robots outfitted with heaters, which he dressed in human clothes and left in the woods—part of a complicated effort to prove that mosquitoes could sense body heat. Across the ocean, in Austria, an entomologist working for the International Atomic Energy Agency informed me, soberly, that he was in the planning stages for a factory capable of breeding a million sterile male mosquitoes a day for release in northern Sudan. (The idea being that the sterile bugs would outnumber fertile ones, causing the population to plummet.) All in all, I discovered, the task of concocting new strategies to eliminate mosquitoes now consumes the full-time careers of hundreds of brilliant scientists: a massive, multi-million-dollar effort to combat an insect so fragile that it can be killed by a brief gust of wind.

Expecting that any of these schemes will eventually pan out takes some effort. But I wanted to believe there was hope. We're smarter than mosquitoes, after all, and you have to root for the home team. Besides, we're still the underdogs: a species with skin like a baby zucchini, pitted against perfect killing machines, tiny airborne disease carriers equipped with a hypodermic snout and sensory equipment capable of detecting a person 50 yards away. Assessing our chances from an armchair, though, wasn't the same as touring the battlefield, and in the end I set off to find the front lines. The search led me from Baltimore high-rises to North African marshes, but it started, simply enough, in the swamp. The place where it all began.