In this bonus episode of Cool Facts About Animals, we interviewed Catherine Oliverius, a professor of history of Stanford University.

And my cousin.

Oh, Animalese cousin, who studies the spread diseases through mosquitoes, particularly yellow fever in the southern United States in the 1800s.

We talk about what diseases mosquitoes spread,

the ethics of wiping out mosquito populations, the effects of climate change on mosquitoes. Hint,

it's not good for us humans, but it's great for mosquitoes. And what kids can do to try it to dial back climate change.

Check it out and make sure you listen to a regularly scheduled episode on mosquitoes,

which should already be in your feed.

Thanks as always for listening.

My name is Catherine Oliverius. I am history professor at Stanford, and I work.

Yellow fever, which is a mosquito-born disease in the American South in the 19th century.

So yellow fever, which has probably come up in some of your research about mosquitoes,

was a very serious disease in America until the 20th century when we

eradicated mosquitoes from the American Deep South, but yellow fever still kills tens of thousands

of people every year to, mostly in Africa and South America.

And so these questions are really, really important, especially with climate change as different

kinds of climates and weather patterns are allowing

mosquitoes to breed in new places.

Because it's getting warmer?

Because it's getting warmer and wetter some places or muggyer in other places and also because

when you do things like deforeshed, so when you cut down a lot of trees, you can create new kinds

of landscapes which have a lot of water in them, puddles, things like this, and these are breeding

...