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Comment by somenameforme | Hacker News Reader

Siberia is also known to have just extremely brutal mosquito seasons. Turns out even -40C isn't enough to do away with the little persistent blood suckers.

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Not surprising at all to me after several summer trips to interior Alaska. The mosquitoes are so thick that you inhale them sometimes; which is so disgusting. I slathered myself in Deet (the only thing that works) and was mostly ok. Even then they find every square mm that you missed. I sat down for 30 minutes on a bench leaning forward talking to some people. My shirt pulled up about 1/2” (12mm). Later I counted 137 bites (some had merged due to swelling) across that strip of exposed flesh!

Interior British Columbia sounds similar. I used to work in the forest and they were so persistent, invasive, and aggressive. You had to just stop caring because they were relentless and virtually unstoppable. They'd end up in your clothing, in your hair, your nose, mouth... Sometimes the itch was so severe it burned.

I don't miss that. It usually peaked and calmed down with the season, but if it was warm enough they were always around.

From what I know, Siberia's mosquitoes are even more brutal than those in the more temperate regions of Russia, and there are far more of them. Iceland's lack of mosquitoes doesn't seem to be due to the cold itself; something else must be at play. Iceland's average winter temperate is around -1C.

Much shorter breeding season so maybe evolutionary selection made them even more aggressive than the typical US swamp mosquito. The worst I've ever encountered here in Texas some kind of deer fly, and they're tough and bloodthirstily agressive. I have backhanded them 20ft and they come back for more.

I've read that there are tribes who spent a month or more at the peak of biting insect season hiding in their tents and filling them with smoke. The bugs swarm so thickly that they can kill cows. Not by biting them to death, but by clogging their nostrils until the cow suffocates.

And Alaska.

Nothing killed my dream of a private island in Alaska quite so fast as elephant mosquitoes[0]

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toxorhynchites_rutilus

The wikipedia article you linked to says that the adults of that species feed only on nectar and do not suck blood.

... and have a range largely in the south-eastern United States.

Which isn't quite where Alaska is located.

Good point. I wonder if they'd heard about huge mosquitoes up north and just looked for first wikipedia article about large mosquitoes.

Maybe they were thinking of this one. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culiseta_alaskaensis

This one had a large size and was a blood sucker, but wrong side of the continent again. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psorophora_ciliata

Honestly, I was so confident in what I thought I knew (namely evil giant Alaskan mosquitoes) that I didn’t bother to read the article I linked, I just added it for others’ context. Culiseta alaskaensis is probably the source of confusion, and I think a switch-up happened when this was first relayed to me. Looks like the island might be back on, assuming it doesn’t get hot enough to become temperate in the next few years hah.

>Tx. rutilus feeding behaviors make them strikingly different from a typical mosquito. Both adult males and females are strictly nectar-feeding and so they do not have a role in the transmission of pathogens to animals as in other mosquitoes.[7] Instead, their larvae are predacious and could potentially help curb the spread of diseases via vector mosquitoes. While they commonly prey on copepods, rotifers, ostracods, and chironomids, they also generally have a preference for certain species of mosquito larvae including common disease vectors such as Aedes albopictus, Aedes aegypti, and Aedes polynesiensis.

what's the issue?

In my experience Black flies[1] and no-see-ums[2] are far worse (not counting mosquitoes born disease). It's like a massive angry cloud of micro horseflies that intend to dismember you bite by bite.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_fly [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ceratopogonidae

FWIW black flies are also disease carriers.

Yeah, they can, I was just commenting on the physical experience as to which insects would keep me away from the northern latitudes.

While technically true, I think that's in tropical Africa. Are there also diseases that they carry in North America? Even without disease, I tend to agree with the OP that black flies are worse than mosquitoes, and don't think I've ever heard of anyone getting a disease from a black fly bite in the US or Canada.

You're mostly correct, but apparently not totally :) - I did think that it was further north, but the human cases are usually only in south and central america and africa. Nonetheless, there are some.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4809994/ (human cases in the US - but is primarily in animals)

https://www.merckvetmanual.com/poultry/bloodborne-organisms-... (birds only, but still north american disease)

There's also an allergic reaction apparently due to large numbers of bites called simuliotoxicosis / black fly fever.

There's also this mysterious one in europe. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7920075/

Aaaand there's this site claiming possible encephalitis transmission, although I kinda feel I'd prefer a better cite than that. https://www.mosquitomagnet.com/resources/faq-black-fly-other...

The Blackfly song has it right then? Thank you National Film Board of Canada: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f389hIxZAOc

Pretty much - although after living with it for 4 year I can report it's often worse. =) The local bookstore gave a discount for the first bite of the season if you lived long enough to collect.

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