The news media is in a big kerfuffle over reports of a new genetically modified mosquito that is resistant to malarial parasites and all the stronger than wild mosquitoes for it. Sounds perfect, right? Stronger mosquitoes resistant to disease would easily eclipse those weaklings who fall prey. Release enough of them into the wild and soon enough there'd be no more malaria.

Except....each malarial locale is as unique as a snowflake, with local malarial strains specifically adapted to local mosquitoes with their own just-so habits and idiosyncratic lifestyles. There are over a dozen species of Anopheles mosquitoes that effectively transmit human malarias. Some thrive in shady streams, some in still, sunny puddles, others in salty marshes. There are species of malarial mosquitoes that live in the desert, and others that reside in dense forest.

And wild malarial mosquitoes are constantly transforming themselves to better exploit their local environs, like water to a cup, in ways scientists can only dimly grasp. Some mosquitoes have figured out how to foil insecticide-treated bednets, by biting people before they get in bed. Even as I write anopheline mosquitoes are continuing to divide into even more species. This scientists only know from genetic studies, for they can barely tell the critters apart.

This bit of entomological ecology—despite its crucial significance to the problem of malaria--isn’t particularly well-known, even to those most intimately involved with the disease. I recently asked a bunch of nurses at a NIH-funded malaria research clinic in Malawi where all the local malarial mosquitoes bred, and they answered in unison--“in the swamp.” Not so, said the mosquito biologist in the next building over.In fact the bugs that were killing their patients nursed their young in the puddles right outside the hospital’s unscreened windows.

To think that we could develop a man-made mosquito--our own super-mozzie--more adept than those in the wild, with their great diversity of habits and lifestyles greatly underestimates the wilingness of these dappled flies. Stalked by pathogens, relied upon by no creature, these insects have thrived for over 100 million years, in almost every place where the sun shines and the rain falls, however seldom. They're fantastically good at it. Some GM mosquito might beat a few of these hardy survivors, in some places, at some times, but they couldn't beat them everywhere.

GM mosquitoes surely will teach us something about the spread of malaria but they won’t end it. As with DDT, there's no one-size-fits-all solution to malaria, our most ancient scourge, try as we might to find one.