Jamie's deep question of the day

Jamie likes to hit you with deep questions with little or no warning. Today, they are off from school and some friends were coming over so I took the boys out to get bagels. As we were getting of the car, Jamie broke his usual stream of consciousness talk and said, "Dad, why did God make mosquitoes?" Now my usual approach to such a question would be to bring in the "best possible world" idea of philosophical optimism, meaning that if there is something bad in the world it is only so because it has to be there to do something good as well. I was trying to figure out how to apply this to mosquitoes, when it became clear that Jamie had already pursued this line of thought. "I mean," he went on, "is there ANYTHING good about mosquitoes?" We agreed that there was not, but that left me pretty stumped for an answer, or at least a good one.