The dry-season malaria paradox, a bar to eradication, is solved

that transmit malaria in Africa have short and merry lives. Six or seven weeks is as much as their adults can manage. To maintain their populations they must lay eggs in water, in which their larvae then grow and pupate. This means such mozzies fly all year round in wet places, but in those that experience pronounced dry seasons, they vanish. In theory, malarial mosquitoes should die out entirely during dry spells that go on for months, for their eggs are insufficiently drought-resistant to last that long. Nevertheless, days after rains return, so too do the mosquitoes.