Hacker News Reader

Comment by Kenji | Hacker News Reader

That's interesting. I seem to kill small mosquitoes when they bite me. I've observed it multiple times. It lands, it bites and it becomes completely unresponsive. Because I was drunk at the time, I chalked it up to blood alcohol content which will yield quite a bit of alcohol if a mosquito drinks so-and-so many times its own body weight (I did some basic math) but since then it also happened when I was sober.

View on HN

I had this happen to me. For most of my life, barely ever got bitten by mosquitos, and when they did, they usually died while feeding, on my skin.

From age 30 onwards, I suffer them as much as the next guy, not sure what could have changed since.

Even if you were at 0.5% BAC (legal driving limit is 0.08%, and 0.5% would kill a lot of people), that's still about the alcohol percentage in NA beer. Unlikely to have any effect.

Leaving aside the vast differences in physiology and effects of alcohol on humans vs mosquitoes, mosquitos can drink maybe 2x their body weight in blood. If you drunk 500 bottles of 0.5% a/v beer in 10 minutes it would likely have some effect.

> If you drunk 500 bottles of 0.5% a/v beer in 10 minutes it would likely have some effect.

If you drank the same amount of 0% ABV water in that time, you’d probably die of water intoxication, so I’m not sure any adverse effects of the alcohol would be noticeable.

I'm thinking exploded stomach.

Point is it could be a lot of alcohol for the mosquito.

> If you drunk 500 bottles of 0.5% a/v beer in 10 minutes it would likely have some effect

No, the alcohol wouldn't. Unless you distilled all that beer and ingested the alcohol alone. The massive liquid intake would kill you though.

The liver doesn't store alcohol, so how many grams you ingest in total doesn't matter, only in what concentration. Keep in mind that alcohol is perfectly soluble in water too.

I'm sorry for reading this as "north american" beer instead of "non-alcoholic" beer.

It's an easy mistake to make.

A mosquito can drink 2-3x its body weight. It would not be the same as a NA beer. It would be more like getting a blood transfusion from a drunk.

If it was a pint and the drunk was heroic, it'd be like having 3 or 4 drinks.

(~10 pints of blood in the donor, 1/10 of a lot of alcohol...)

That's very interesting as well. Could you expand a little on what you mean by them becoming completely unresponsive?

Basically it remains "stuck" in position and completely stops moving, even if I wait 5 minutes. Poking it causes no reaction. I can just pick it up and put it away. It is either dead or it passed out.

I’ve never heard anyone have that experience before. Maybe you should share this phenomenon with some relevant scientists?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com