Long before chemicals and sprays, citronella candles, and DEET, nature provided predators for all the critters that humans find pesky. Bats binge on biting flies, frogs feast on mosquitoes, and swallows, well, swallow wasps.

Frogs and toads can eat so many mosquitoes, in fact, that one 2022 study traced a spike in human cases of malaria with an amphibian disease outbreak in parts of Central America. Other studies have shown some bats can eat up to a thousand mosquitoes an hour. (Read why bats are the real superheroes of nature.)

“Most species are controlled very well … by natural enemies,” says Douglas Tallamy, the TA Baker Professor of Agriculture at the University of Delaware.

While such well-known pest-control species get a lot of attention, plenty of other animals spend their days—or nights—seeking out and gorging on summertime insects, in some cases evolving specialized skills to devour their prey. Here are some the most intriguing.

Black bears hunt larvae

Winnie the Pooh may have loved honey, but when real bears dig up beehives it’s much less for sticky, sweet sugar than it is for white, squishy grubs.

A black bear and her cubs scratch at a log—perhaps full of grubs—in the Florida Panther National Wildlife Refuge.
PHOTOGRAPH BY CARLTON WARD, NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC IMAGE COLLECTION

While opportunistic American black bears will eat just about anything from human garbage to fields of sunflowers to an occasional deer fawn, they will, at times, also specialize in insects, including wasp species as aggressive as yellow jackets.

“They’re after the larvae,” says David Garshelis, chairperson for the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s Bear Specialist Group. “I’ve seen them dig out a nest and they get stung the same way we do” before continuing to forage. (Learn how black bears are rebounding throughout North America.)

In some parts of North America, as black bears wait for berries to ripen, the omnivores maintain their body weight or even put on fat almost entirely by eating protein-rich ants, such as yellow ants.

Mosquitoes gobble mosquitoes

In case you thought all mosquitoes are virus-carrying, hike-ruining flying monsters, think again.

A male elephant mosquito, Toxorhynchites rutilus, rests on a black-eyed susan in Oklahoma. The larvae of this species preys on other mosquito larvae.
PHOTOGRAPH BY BRYAN REYNOLDS / ALAMY

Some mosquitoes, like Toxorhynchites rutilus septentrionalis, native to the U.S. Southeast, make their living eating other mosquitoes. T. septentrionalis larvae, which live in pockets of standing water like tree hollows, devour other smaller mosquito larvae, including species that spread human diseases. In the laboratory, one T. septentrionalis mosquito larva will kill between 20 and 50 other mosquito larvae a day.

Intriguingly, these larvae are surplus killers, dispatching their victims but not eating them, according to a 2022 paper.

“If compulsive killing occurs naturally, it can increase the effectiveness of Toxorhynchites as agents of control of blood-sucking mosquitoes,” the authors write.

Cuckoos adore caterpillars

For many bird species, nothing beats a tasty cache of thousands of caterpillars—unless those caterpillars are covered in prickly hairs that can irritate your insides. But not the yellow-billed cuckoo of North America.

Yellow-billed cuckoos are one of the only birds that can handle eating hairy caterpillars.
PHOTOGRAPH BY DANITA DELIMONT/ ALAMY

This relatively large bird with a striking yellow beak can handle gorging on hairy caterpillars by periodically shedding the lining of its esophagus and stomach—creating an offal akin to an owl pellet—then starting over again. (Watch a caterpillar transform into a butterfly.)

While species such as tent caterpillars and fall webworms are native to North America, their numbers periodically explode, giving yellow-billed cuckoos a feast of unimaginable proportion, with some research showing they can eat up to a hundred caterpillars in one sitting.

Newts keep a steady diet—of mosquitoes

If you ever see a bright red eastern newt scuttling along a trail in the eastern U.S., whisper a word of thanks.

Red-spotted newts (pictured. a young animal in its eft phase) carry toxins that make them poisonous to predators.
PHOTOGRAPH BY JOHN CANCALOSI/ NATURE PICTURE LIBRARY

These long-lived salamanders—many make it 12 to or even 15 years—eat disease-carrying mosquitoes at every stage of their lives, from larvae to juveniles to adults.

JJ Apodaca, executive director of the Amphibian and Reptile Conservancy, can’t say exactly how many mosquito larvae an eastern newt may consume in a day, but the creatures have voracious appetites and exist at high enough numbers to “make an impact” on mosquito populations.

Tanagers like their wasps well done

The summer tanager may be beautiful with its flashy red body, but that’s likely little consolation to the wasps the tanagers swipe out of the air, carry back to a tree, and beat to death on a branch.

The summer tanager “apparently has no fear of stinging insects, often raiding wasp nests and occasionally becoming a minor nuisance around beehives,” says the Audubon Society.
PHOTOGRAPH BY DAVID WELLING/ MINDEN PICTURES

Summer tanagers, which live throughout the southern U.S. and migrate each year to South America, dine mostly on insects. But unlike most other birds, the summer tanager specializes on bees and wasps.

To avoid being stung, they catch wasps like yellow jackets from the air, and, once dispatched, rub the stingers off on a branch before dining, according to the Cornell Lab of Ornithology.

They will also tear apart nests to eat wasp larvae packed with protein.

Ecosystems off-kilter

While natural pest control is diverse, Tallamy says, “the heavy hand of humans has messed up that diversity.”

In many cases, human-caused impacts such as habitat loss, climate change, and pollution may harm natural predators, such as birds and other critters.

“We can’t live on this planet by getting rid of insects,” Tallamy says. “They are the little things that run the world. So how to control the things that are out of whack is something we can focus on.”