#1 Ouch! You frantically slap your arms and legs trying to defend your tower from the ruthless miniature vampires. Mosquitos! They seem to swarm in from all sides; buzzing in your ear, injecting their proboscis in your neck, arms and legs, and getting in your face. Meanwhile someone else has an occasional mosquito and doesn’t seem bothered at all, this is all in the same yard. Why are they attacking you, but not them? What makes you so special? Why do they even need our blood?
#2 Mosquitos need our blood because they need the iron and proteins from our blood to make eggs (1). Believe it or not, it’s only the females that drink our blood. The diet of a male mosquito consists exclusively of nectar from plants. Females will also drink nectar, but they are preferential to blood, to make more eggs (1). After a full meal of blood, a female mosquito can lay up to about 240 eggs from the nutrients in the blood (2). The female mosquito will lay her eggs in places like lakes, puddles, or makeshift body of water which can range from a kiddie pool full of rainwater to a bucket. Just like human babies can’t survive if their mother’s body isn’t a certain temperature or chicken eggs need to be incubated if separated from their mother; mosquito eggs can only hatch in water that is a certain temperature. If the water isn’t a certain temperature, the eggs will use their special ability to survive.
#3 Did you know that mosquito eggs can delay their development until the water is warm enough? It’s true! It’s called diapause and they can ‘freeze’ for months on end and wait until they can continue life (3). For example, the Wyeomyia mosquito larvae survive over the winter in a frozen state until they thaw in the spring, and hatch into a larva (1).Now do you see why there always seems to be an abundance of those buggers? It doesn’t help that they only take a week to hatch either. The first stage in a mosquito’s life is an egg. The eggs are laid with up to about 240 brothers and sister in a single spot called a raft (5). They will all hatch in two to three days and then they will continue to the next stage, the larva.
#4 The larva is the second stage and where the mosquitos start to change into adults. They move around in an S-shaped motion, which is how they got the nickname “wrigglers” (3). The wrigglers continue to live underwater eating small pieces of natural matter (3). During the larva stage, they go through four growing stages called instars (3). After each instar, they molt (shed their skin) making it possible for more growth to occur (1, 8). When they’re done their four stages, they have arrived to the pupa stage. The maturing mosquitos curl up into a comma shape and sit semi-close to the surface of the water. Pupas come up to the surface often to breathe using the respiratory trumpets they developed during the larva stage (1). Can you imagine not eating at all for a few days? Not even drinking? That’s perfectly normal for pupas. They don’t eat or drink anything while they are curled up in their comma –shaped stance as they wait for their next and last stage (1).
#5 This stage is the most horrible stage of them all! Not for the mosquitos, no, for you! The adult life of a mosquito is pretty simple, but you probably don’t really want to know about the mosquitos that don’t bother you. Nope, you want to know about the mosquitos that do. A female mosquito has one all important goal. Get blood and reproduce so that the cycle can start all over again. Do you ever wonder why you never feel them sucking your blood? That’s because humans aren’t the only ones with anesthetics.
#6 You look down at your arm and are horrified to find a mosquito finishing her meal. “How did I not feel that?” You wonder. It’s because when mosquitos inject their proboscis into your skin they release two things into your blood stream. One is an anesthetic and the second one is an anticoagulant. The anesthetic released into your bloodstream enables the mosquito to feed on you without you ever feeling a thing (2). Why do they need to do that? Believe it or not, mosquitos have saw-like teeth that they use to drill into your skin to get to the blood (2)! After they finish giving you an anesthetic, they inject an anticoagulant. The anticoagulant helps the blood to flow freely for the mosquito while it imbibes its meal. You’re probably wondering what can be done to stop these irritating fiends, well, everything is eaten by something.
#7 Unfortunately, for mosquitos, they have predators throughout each and every one of their stages! From the moment their born to the second they die. While they’re eggs they are in danger of getting eaten by a dragonfly nymph which is also capable of eating them in all of their stages (1). While they are in the larva stage, they are sometimes eaten mosquitofish, or the scientific term, Gambusia which are found and can be introduced in ponds (1). These two predators make a significant difference in the population of mosquitos, but there are other predators (1). Two other predators, like a bird called the Purple Martian and bats do help, but mosquitos are only about 1% of their diet (1). You know the life cycle of mosquitos and how they’re able to suck your blood. Now that you know a little (or a lot) about mosquitos; you’ll be able to understand why mosquitos might be attracted to you more than others.
#8 Did you know that one person out of ten people is highly preferable by mosquitos (4)? That could be you! Just like certain humans, mosquitos are picky on who is ‘privileged’ enough to be their next meal. People that have a high level of cholesterol or steroids on the surface of their skin tend to attract more mosquitos (4). The smell of uric (urine) acid also appeals to mosquitoes (4) . Don’t forget one of the things that mosquitos is attracted to that every human has that gives away their location. When you breathe in oxygen, you breathe out what? Carbon dioxide! The mosquitos smell carbon dioxide to pinpoint their prey. You. The mosquitos figure that if it can breathe out carbon dioxide, it most likely is alive, and if it’s alive, it has blood. Bingo. Of course, everyone has a smell that they don’t like and so do mosquitos.
#9 Citronella, DEET, oil fromeucalyptus plants, and catnip (yes, catnip)—t. Those are a few of the smells that repel mosquitos (6). You can also plant herbs such as rosemary, lavender, and horsemint.! You can also plant garlic in your gardens; : garlic bulbs are even used directly for repellents (6).! Lastly, there are plants that can be planted around your house as decorations such as basil, penny royal, and ageratum. All of those herbs and plants can help decorate your garden/backyard and ward off mosquitos (except the catnip might attractdraw cats) all in the same time.!
#10 It probably seems like every female mosquito’s goal is to make more blood-sucking monsters to make your life miserable, doesn’t it? That’s one way to put it. The next time you are assaulted by mosquitos, their wings buzzing at 500 beats per second in your ear, remember what a difficult path they had to take to reach you (7). They have had to survive against long odds to seek out one refreshing drink (you can spare a drop of blood) to continue a cycle first started as early as 250 million years ago (9). True, mosquitos seem to be an ever-present annoyance, but think about it. If you had survived the many predators waiting to make a meal of you throughout your whole entire life and then, just as you were arriving atgetting thea meal you needed to continue your lineage, your life was carelesslyis ended by a single flick of a human finger.
1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mosquito#Feeding_habits_of_adults
2. http://sharkarama.hubpages.com/hub/mosquitolifecycle
3. http://www.pca.state.mn.us/index.php/living-green/living-green-citizen/for-kids/creature-feature/mosquito.html
4. http://www.webmd.com/allergies/features/are-you-mosquito-magnet
5. Spielman, Andrew. Mosquito: A Natural History of Our Most Persistent and Deadly Foe. New York: Hyperion, 2001. Print.
6. http://www.buzzle.com/articles/mosquito-repellent-plants.html
7. Spielman, Andrew. Mosquito: The Story of Man's Deadliest Foe. New York: Hyperion, 2002. Print.
8. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molt
9. http://www.metapathogen.com/mosquito/