Not all mosquitoes bite. Large, clumsy human beings are a wonderful source of warm blood.
How do mosquitoes find a victim?
Mosquitoes find people by their movements, by the heat that we radiate and by smell. When a mosquito flies past our ear, we hear a high tinkling buzzing, this is the sound from the work of tiny mosquito wings.
Scientists believe that buzzing attracts individuals of the opposite sex, but it is especially tiring for us at night, when the heat does not allow us to sleep. According to scientists, mosquitoes most often go on their bloody hunt at night. At dawn, the warring parties can calm down and sleep instead of exchanging deadly blows.
Bite process
Having made a soft landing on the surface of human skin, a mosquito gently taps its proboscis on it, as if knocking on a door. The proboscis of the mosquito is more like a snout. Then, lifting his hairy lip, the mosquito gently sticks his stylet, hollow inside, into the skin. With his surgical instrument, the mosquito gropes for small veins and capillaries in search of blood. The process of saturation of the mosquito with blood lasts less than a minute.
Before you start sucking blood through a straw, the mosquito injects a special substance into the blood that prevents it from clotting (so that the blood does not clot while the mosquito sucks it). A mosquito can swallow blood four times more than it weighs itself.At the end of a bloody mosquito dinner, his stomach was unbelievably bloated. If you watch a female having dinner on your arm, then by the end of dinner the blood shines through the wall of the mosquito’s abdomen. According to one zoologist, a blood-repelled mosquito looks like a red ball on a Christmas tree.
Interesting fact: only female mosquitoes bite.
The danger of mosquito bites
It is better, of course, not to observe a mosquito, but simply slam it. Together with saliva, this blood-sucking can introduce into your bloodstream an infection that a mosquito transfers from one of its victims to another. The most serious disease that mosquitoes suffer is malaria. 300 million people worldwide suffer from malaria, mainly in tropical countries.
Interesting fact: a mosquito can swallow blood four times more than it weighs itself.
Why does a mosquito bite itch?
Having sucked blood, the female mosquito takes out its tube from the puncture and flies away. If this was your first mosquito bite in your life, then you will not feel anything at all and you will never know that you dined with your blood. But if this is not the first contact with a mosquito, then the body has already become sensitive to proteins that are contained in mosquito saliva.
The bite site will swell and itch, that is, an allergic reaction will develop. If the bites are repeated very often, then the body can get used to mosquito proteins. For example, some researchers working with mosquitoes have been bitten by mosquitoes so many times that they lost their sensitivity to proteins, their saliva and bites ceased to swell and itch.
Why do mosquitoes drink blood?
A female mosquito drinks blood because it contains a large amount of amino acids - the building blocks of proteins that are necessary for the full development of eggs. Having sucked blood, the female can lay about 100 eggs. If the female is deprived of a blood ration, then she will still lay the fertilized eggs, but there will be no more than ten, and more often only one.
Who do mosquitoes bite more often?
Although we don’t really like to realize that on warm summer evenings we are eaten alive, we must nevertheless say that a person is by no means the favorite dish of a mosquito. Human blood contains little isoleucine amino acid, which is essential for egg formation. Therefore, for the mosquito, buffalo or rat blood is preferable. But humans displaced animals from their usual habitats, so mosquitoes have to depend on us. We provide them with housing (unnecessary bottles and tins, old clothes) and food (our own warm blood). We are not buffaloes, but the position obliges ...
