MOSQUITO: noun mos·qui·to \mə-ˈskē-(ˌ)tō\: A small flying bloodthirsty vampire that is universally hated.
Oh, mosquitoes, these annoying, disease-carrying and blood-sucking insects that make a living by biting the skin of just about anything that is in motion. Let it be their itchy bites or their whining sound, mosquitoes pesters the hell out of us.
NRP station KQED and PBS have a new edition of Deep Look on YouTube that will inform us a little bit more about the mosquito bites, revealing the complex blood-guzzling toolkit mosquitoes use that maybe will help us understand them more in order to fight them better.
Wait, did you know that mosquitoes are pesky pests but with a good tasty food choices? YES. They don’t have too many fans, I agree, but here’s some real tragic news for you chubby people out there…MOSQUITOES LOVE YOU!
Given the fact that they are attracted to CO2 and lactic acid, bigger people are often considered ‘mosquito magnets’. So let’s take a minute to perceive things from a mosquito’s point of view, it’s amazing how it works.
As the video demonstrates above, when having strong cravings for blood, there’s a protective sheath that retracts initiating the whole procedure of stealing blood.
To sum up, six highly sophisticated needles inhabit the mosquito’s proboscis. The outer pair consists of tiny bladed teeth that saw through your skin. Next to them, are needles used to hold the tissue apart so it can hunt thoroughly for a blood vessel in there. After that, one of the two remaining needles has receptors that pick up chemical signals released by blood vessels to guide the tip in. Then, it’s time to vacuum up all the blood by exerting a suction force.
This sounds irritating so far, right? Just wait to hear the role of the sixth and final needle that is really threatening for us, humans. It is this needle that injects an assortment of mosquito saliva and anticoagulant that keeps blood flowing and numbs the site of injection causing an itchy swelling afterwards, and this is exactly where sneaky beasts like Malaria parasites and Zika viruses can remain out of sight.
By the way, have you heard about the scientists who are engineering the extinction of mosquitoes by breeding the male insects to be sterile? What would happen, you wonder, if we all woke up tomorrow in a world that is entirely free of mosquitoes?