When a mosquito can’t stop drinking blood, the result isn’t pretty
entomologytoday.org
entomologytoday.org
It takes some time, you will get a mosquito bite from it, but it doesn't end well for the mosquito which you may or may not find satisfaction in. It might help being young and a bit bored.
Fully agreed on the sandflies. They actually relate to the topic at hand. Sandflies don't stop sucking unless shooed away. A couple of years ago we were talking to an older couple who lived in fjordland. They had moved away when their first kid was born, because the baby could not chase the sandflies away, so was tormented by sandflies which would sit on it and suck until exploded.
Shooed away? Wouldn't you swat them?
This experience has made me more aware of the insects around me if I am swimming at a beach.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10125599/Fauci-fire...
Behold the greedy gluttons pop like balloons and keep at it anyway. With the vast intellect of a cloud, nothing in their minuscule brain cell find anything odd about the fact that they are getting flooded in "food". Even if the nerves of the abdomen are severed, they are ignoring every other movement and stimuli, gotta chug.
Mosquitos don't eat blood. It's not food.
> Males typically live for about 5–7 days, feeding on nectar and other sources of sugar. After obtaining a full blood meal, the female will rest for a few days while the blood is digested and eggs are developed.
I live on Earth-32453, where are you from?
Can we all agree that anything about mosquitos isn't pretty anyway?
Working link in case you are interested:
I haven't seen this with YouTube before. It must have to do with the embed settings being disabled for the video and a cookie getting set. If the cookie is present, the connection to the server is refused.
Which makes me wonder, how was the mosquito able to live, let a lone function, the whole day with it's ventral nerve cord destroyed?
> The first ever exploding mosquitoes can be attributed to Robert Gwadz, Ph.D., in a discovery that was made through basic laboratory research over 50 years ago. He found that making an incision in the ventral nerve cord of a mosquito cuts off the signal to stop feeding, giving it an unquenchable thirst for blood. Mosquitoes that have undergone this procedure can drink in excess of four times their weight and may eventually burst. This led Gwadz to a hypothesis that blood ingestion is regulated by abdominal stretch receptors that prevent mosquitoes from (quite literally) drinking themselves to death.
I find it absolutely wild that we can perform neurological surgery on mosquitos. That is so amazing. I tried to find some references on the surgical instruments. This one article describes the process of dissecting a fly's nervous system without taking it out -- tldr: nail it to a mount and split its back and remove the organs and there it it:
That is indeed implausible. The correct method is to pinch the skin around it so it can't remove its proboscis.
It's a terrible quality of life issue and it doesn't seem like any politicians have the will to act until a major disease outbreak occurs.
Meanwhile at least one private company and at least one California city have released Wolbachia-infected mosquitos [3],[4] or are seeking approval to release GMO mosquitos [5] to control viral transmission or Aedes breeding.
And Alameda county, at least, has a decent webpage up outlining its program [6].
Mosquito control, in general, is probably somewhat complicated by not wanting to eradicate the native mosquito species.
1 - https://www.cdph.ca.gov/Programs/CID/DCDC/Pages/Mosquitoesan...
3 - https://www.businessinsider.com/wolbachia-mosquitoes-califor...
4 - https://www.wired.com/2016/08/california-city-fending-off-zi...
"You're mad", everyone said, "you're just making a perfect breeding ground for mosquitoes, with that big pool and the trees providing shade!" And indeed, the mosquitoes flocked there and bred like crazy. Mosquitoes all over.
Before long, his beautiful new pond was absolutely hoaching with mosquito larvae, which the carp he'd stocked it with ate like they'd heard it was getting banned.
Now there aren't any mosquitoes for about a three mile radius.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mosquitofish#Environmental_imp...
It eliminated the issue in my house and yard. I got 2 neighbors to get them and we now have a sort of shield up over the neighborhood.
I got a 20lb CO2 tank, and have to fill it up every 30 days or so during the summer months.
It is not cheap or easy, but damn it works. Highly recommend if you hit your limit.
just kidding. :D
They filter and clean huge amounts of freshwater. Males pollinate plants. They are responsible of massive energy interchanges between vertebrates and invertebrates in all directions and nodes of the trophic chains. Thousands of species of animals depend on them directly or indirectly.
Mao tried exactly the same. It didn't ended exactly according to plan.
But please, don't let your ignorance about biological ecosystems to stop you and try it. I need the laughs.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Pests_campaign
And between 15 and 55 million of people died by his "I'm smarter than science" arrogance
Reminder for what you said:
> One catch they also kill more than half a million people every year. A small price to pay you say? I say burn all of mosquitos every single one to ashes.
What Mao did:
> The "Four Pests" campaign was introduced in 1958 as a hygiene campaign aimed to eradicate the pests responsible for the transmission of pestilence and disease:
> - the mosquitos responsible for malaria
> - the rodents that spread the plague
> - the pervasive airborne flies
> - the sparrows—specifically the Eurasian tree sparrow—which ate grain seed and fruit
I believe your position on mosquitos is directly equivalent to Mao's position, in every way. Don't tell other people they don't understand you when they clearly do, much better than yourself apparently.
Enough time has passed to show that the direct biosphere effects of exterminating disease carrying mosquitos are basically undetectable. For that matter, history has even showed that the biosphere effects of the eradication process via drainage and mass DDT application were relatively minor in the long run.
[1] https://www.cdc.gov/malaria/about/history/elimination_us.htm...
I would say basically unreported
Near one third of the species of freshwater fishes extant in the whole planet face extinction currently.
Of those, all the freshwater species of megafishes (all species reaching 30Kg) reduced their population by 94% in the last 50 years. Some, like the Chinese Paddlefish (one of the biggest freshwater fishes known in the planet, 7m long) went extinct.
Rivers provide a 25% of the food that we humans, eat, and 200 millions of people rely directly on freshwater fishes as main source of proteins in the diet.
Before to start rolling this shitball of consequences downhill, we need to remind ourselves that the danger is not negligible, not at all, and that the outcome would be unpredictable and irreversible. There are "a million multiverses" in what such drastic and irresponsible actions could return and bite us hard in the gorge.
LOL, good one.
As in (not a facetious example) the energy i spend each time i try to kill one?
The counter-argument leans heavily on the vague feeling that we shouldn't do this, rather then much concrete-evidence this would really be a problem. And the communities blighted by mosquito-born pathogens (which covers a huge chunk of human civilization on the planet) I suspect are only restrained on account of the lack of money and technology to implement it themselves.
IMO the question is going to be answered for us at some point: a sufficiently virulent, mosquito born disease will emerge (or just be Zika, with mosquito carriers moving into 1st world areas on the back of climate change) and the answer will rapidly become yes.
[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK585176/
Inform yourself better. We have more than a vague feeling that they play a major role on many ecosystems.
Zoologists study this animals since XIX century at least and there is a pile of literature about them bigger than the Liberty statue. Mosquito life cycle in particular is middle-school grade knowledge.