Each week, Atlas Obscura is providing a new short excerpt from our upcoming book, Wild Life: An Explorer’s Guide to the World’s Living Wonders (September 17, 2024). In most places, midges don’t command much respect, inspiring annoyance and vague shooing motions and disappearing by the billions into the mouths of larger creatures. At the bottom of the world, though, everything is topsy-turvy. The Antarctic midge is the largest land animal endemic to the continent. In other words, Africa and Asia have elephants, North America has bison, and Antarctica has the…
