Or is it that the victims pest warning system is currently winning the biological arms race, in which case how are mosquitoes able to successfully reproduce? Or is it that mosquitoes have evolved such that their spawning numbers offset the difficulty they have biting?
Biology is hard.
The mosquito likely evolved to try, but the body evolves to defend just the same. Your irritation is your own body’s immune response after all.
Biological arms race
Most mosquito bites I get I don’t find out about until hours later.
They have, the ones that irritate you either make an error or your body has a bad reaction to something in their bite.
Their needle is actually 6 different appendages. Shit is highly evolved
I didn’t give consent to be penetrated by those appendages.
Mosquitoes are not a big problem for me, and their bites do not make me itch.
My kid, however… mosquitoes just swarm him, and the poor thing swells up when he’s bitten.
I’ve noticed that too. When out with friends, some people get bitten more than their fair share.
It depends on blood type. They prefer O’s and +’s
O+ here and I am the magnet.
O- and got swarmed as a kid. A fucking cloud around me and only me :-/
Got bitten so much I developed a resistance or something so there’s that!
Have heard that blood type (O) but not about rhesus (- or +) attracts the bastards.
A is their second favourite after O, IIRC.
Yep my mum is AB+ and she is the magnet if I’m not on holiday with them :)
I’m so delicious I manage to protect the full villa.
It’s genetics. We produce some oil or something that mosquitos smell. And some people produce more then others.
Basically bad luck.
They do a really shitty job of ‘not irritating’ your skin. They get it right half the time. The only biological success they’ve had in evolution is that they are so freaking numerous. Ask a northern Ontarian Indigenous person who grew up in rocky swamps … you haven’t seen mosquitoes until you’ve breathed in clouds of them.
clouds of them
Baby, you got
a stewburgers goingThat sounds awful. How do you guys manage? Just stay indoors?
I gave up on anything but DEET years ago. If they’re real bad though even that sometimes isn’t enough. That’s face net and baggy full body clothing time.
You speak truth.
Hello from the hell-swamps of Louisiana, where it’s Summer for 8-10 months a year and the mosquitos are an omnipresent scourge.
Bonus swarm: termite flights so densely packed that they show up as “weather” on radar.
Our summers up here are at their peak in June and July and on hot still windless evenings if you are caught out in the wild, it’s torturous. I can’t imagine what it would be like down there with a longer hot season. There’s a city near here called North Bay where every July the city on the shores of a large lake gets infested with swarms of shad flies, harmless bugs but so thick and numerous that the place ends up smelling like a giant tin of tuna.
In all fairness, since it’s more of a baseline experience, there are fewer mosquito swam clouds and more biological countermeasures like geckos and anoles that help snap ‘em up.
The sheer density of what they can look like in the high north is almost unimaginable to me. I think you’ve actually got the edge there still, and for that you have my sympathy.
If you’d ever been really swarmed by mosquitoes or lived in a place where they are ever present you’d not be asking this question.
- When they swarm enough they are nearly impossible to avoid.
- When their presence is constant some people just stop reacting to the bites. I only ever notice mosquito bites on places that get chaffed (like the wrists and hands, around collars and cuffs). If they bite a place you wouldn’t normally scratch and can avoid scratching the area after a bite, for some people a welt is much less likely to form.
- They don’t go after only people. Your irritation at a few bites is nothing compared to the diversity in the evolutionary arms race between mosquitoes and their prey.
- Only the mothers feed on blood. Other mosquito eat mostly plant nectar.
I am sure I read somewhere that they defecate in the hole after they have drawn blood and that is what causes the irritation. That does not sound as if they are particularly worried about being regarded as annoying, in fact it feels like they see it as a bonus.
My understanding is that when they bite you, they also inject a bit of anticoagulant to prevent clotting as they suck blood out. The foreign material creates an allergic reaction that itches.
I don’t think there would be much of an evolutionary advantage to irritating your victim until they start a pesticidal war against you and your kind.
They just seemed to have the correct attitude to do it anyway.
That sounds completely made up. Why would they do that?
I definitely had that as vaguely factual, I thought heavy from blood they lightened the load before flying off and the hole was a too tempting target plus they enjoyed the symbolism. I asked ChatGPT and it said it was made up and was quite sneering about it so I suppose that is that.
I didn’t know mosquitoes enjoyed symbolism. Perhaps I can read them some Baudelaire next time
You might be conflating with the housefly which will throw up on food it lands on because the enzymes break it down so they can suck it up.
Dominance.
Whatever you read was pure mosquitoshit uwu
Bitch they don’t care about your irritation, what in the hell has gotten into you 🤔
A mosquito, by the sounds of it.
Neither do viruses, but as we’ve observed, they evolve too. Y’know, preserve their species and all that.
They have! For the most part you don’t even notice mosquitoes biting you until after they’re long gone, the part that itches is from the mosquitoes saliva that is left behind! They have evolved to the point that you should never even feel them sticking their proboscis into you so if you actually catch one biting you it’s probably because something went wrong or you just happened to see it land
If only they evolved to not emit high pitch irritating noise.
Honestly, I can see it being a selective trait too. Surely loud mosquitos get detected and killed more often
It’s also worth noting that older humans tend not to hear those sounds as well. This doesn’t explain much, though, because all lot of their other targets hear those pitches just fine.
This might be an evolutionary war, since it’s plausible, that detecting mosquitos lead to less infestations and thereby to a higher survival rate.
Does vary by mosquito species but yeah for the most part.
Alpine mosquitoes with shorter seasons tend to have swarming strategy, they’re loud and you notice when they land on you. It’s just that there’s about 1-200 of them flying about you so lots will still be successful. These ones mostly don’t spread disease but they ruin a hike.
The sneakiest ones are in the tropics and are the species that spread malaria and other disease.
If you’re aware enough, you can feel one landing on you. Easier to do if you’re aware there’s one in the room and you try to focus. No real way for them to evolve around that.
You only feel the ones that you can feel. The goddamn ninja mosquitoes permeate the air we breathe. They’re constantly feeding on us — sapping our life force — and we never even notice.
Well duh. It takes a ninja to sense a ninja. Visit your local dojo to learn more!
The only good thing that came from mosquitoes was Jurassic Park, which I’m ready to give up if their existence was going to be deleted from the timeline of the universe.
They’re more like goddamn vampire mosquitoes, as they drink our blood
It would need to be us that needs to evolve away from being sensitive to mosquito saliva. But our immune system went the other way to be allergic to it so we could defend against any infection or disease the bug might carry. Further proof of human stupidity in our evolution, that we trigger the defense mechanism after the the attack instead of preventing it.
If I remember correctly, mosquito mouth/tip is so especially made. That it does not cause any pain when it pokes through the skin. Some scientist even manage to use that to create needles that mimic the same behavior.
I hate mosquitoes. I’m one of the people that feel them bite nearly every time, it is painful and the bite they leave behind swells and itches. I’ve clawed skin off because of how irritating it feels. I’ll go outside and they naturally gravitate towards me versus others. Existence is pain.
I am the same, blood brother. ✊
Hell yeah ✊
Vitamin B-12 in high doses is your friend! You literally cannot overdose on the stuff, and you’ll start sweating it out. You’ll know it is working when your skin smells faintly like the B-12 tablets. At that point all the mosquitos, ticks, fleas, and chiggers can smell is the riboflavin seeping out your pores. Since the biting insects can’t smell your blood, they don’t bite! They will still crawl on you, so check each other for ticks, fleas, etc. when you come out of tall grass/ wooded areas.
I take a multivitamin with B-12 (folate) that also has riboflavin (B-2) in them. I also eat fortified cereal (has a bunch of folate in it too btw) with fortified soy milk since I’ve always had anemia and need all the vitamins I can get. My doctor has looked over my levels before and said it was all normal but I can look into it again. Thanks for the tip.
B-2 then not B-12. You want riboflavin. I always mix those two up.
O blood eh?
It’s not O. I keep forgetting which one I am but I know it is not O.
The real question is at the evolutionary level which is, what the fuck do the little assholes get out of making their bite a slight irritation?
A tick can bury its head in the tip of dick, spend days sucking so much blood it’s an engorged blimp. Assuming I am blind and my arms are too short to reach my dick, the thing could be there for years and I would have no fucking clue it was there unless I got lime disease or someone else sees it.
Hyperbolic scenario with the whole dick tip thing but I have gotten back from hunting. Saw what looked like a scratch on my neck line, thought it was weird cuz I didn’t remember any prickers scratching me. Fast forward 3 days and I look in the mirror and see what looks like a skin tag. I’m like what the fuck, grab tweezers and rip it off to learn it was a fuckin tick sucking on my jugular for days. They are like the opposite of the mosquito, the tick releases a numbing agent or something so you don’t even feel the bite or the tick the whole time its on you.
Tldr: mosquitoes r dum 4 itching. Ticks r pros at stealth biting.
They didn’t need to.
