Mosquitos infuriated colonizers in the eighteenth-century Caribbean. Recently arrived Europeans found themselves beset by swarms unknown on their home continent that left their skin covered in blemishes. As colonial naturalists weighed in on the mosquito’s effect on daily life in the Caribbean, they theorized how their welts—or lack of them—could signal control over one’s own body and sexual availability through verse. In these poems, “spotless” skin signaled protection from the elements that only elite whites could afford in the torrid climate and enticed men to enact their own penetration on unblemished women. This paper explores how poetry acted as both a scientific and literary form to make legible mosquito bites’ distinctions of race and sexuality in the Anglophone Caribbean. Reading Reverend Isaac Teale’s ode The Gnat and plantation physician James Grainger’s The Sugar-Cane, I argue that poetry provided white creole naturalists a format to envision the illegible relationship between environmental health and desire. The paper also reads these sources alongside Jamaican Anansi tales’ theorization of insect bites as emblematic of white predation, showing how the Afro-Caribbean vernacular tradition provided an appositional view of the plantation’s so-called “healthy” laboring regime.