By Jessy Osterloh, Deception Pass State Park Interpretive Intern
It’s a beautiful summer evening and your friends and family are having a barbecue at Deception Pass State Park.
While the burgers and hot dogs are cooking, some of you strike up a game of volleyball. As you get into the game you begin to warm up a little and you start to sweat. You swat at a mosquito flying laps around your head, but you miss.
Suddenly, you dive for the volleyball, saving your team a point. You spring back up, just as the ball is returned over the net. Spiking the ball over, you score a point for your team! After this brief exertion, you pause and take a couple of breaths to recover.
And that’s when she makes her move.
The mosquito that you’d swatted at before lands on your warm sweaty neck, inserts her proboscis into a blood vessel and injects you with saliva containing anti-clotting enzymes.
The mosquito drinks her fill of your blood and flies off to produce a few hundred eggs.
Only the female mosquitoes drink blood because they need the proteins in blood to produce their eggs. The males are pollinators and feed off of the nectar of flowers. Mosquitoes are attracted to your sweat and warm body, as well as the excess carbon dioxide that you were exhaling.
A few minutes later you sit down to eat your tasty burger. You feel an itch on the back of your neck and reach back to scratch it. Only now do you realize you’ve been bitten by the most evil of the insects. You feel the bite begin to swell and try not to scratch it. You’re having an allergic reaction to the mosquito saliva. Luckily, that is the only negative effect of the mosquito bite – this time.
Many mosquitoes carry diseases such as malaria, dengue fever, encephalitis, and West Nile virus. In Washington, we only have to worry about West Nile virus, and it is not common for people to be infected with it. West Nile virus is transmitted from birds to humans by way of mosquitoes. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) most people have no symptoms and those that do usually recover quickly.
Nonetheless, it is important to protect yourself from these biting insects. Ways to do this are to make sure you keep your doors shut (and screen doors in good repair), wear long sleeved clothing, ,stay indoors as much as possible from dusk to dawn when these blood-sucking insects are most active, and wear bug repellant.
There are about 3,000 species of mosquitoes known. It is rumored that in the Arctic, the mosquitoes can be so thick that they will suffocate a caribou! Scientists believe that the caribou walk into the prevailing wind to avoid the mosquitoes.
According to the American Mosquito Control Association, mosquito activity increases by 5 times during a full moon!
Humans are actively trying to eradicate the 200 or so species of mosquitoes that prey upon us. Some scientists believe that doing so will not disrupt ecosystems because there are so many other small insects that fill similar niches as mosquitoes. In other words, not many species depend on mosquitoes for survival.
Some of the ways in which people are attempting to get rid of mosquitoes include spraying with insecticide and genetically engineering mosquitoes to produce sterile offspring. This has been very successful because the genetically engineered mosquitoes can still mate, but the next generation of mosquitoes does not.
Reprinted by permission: Deception Pass State Park Current, June 2014
Photo by Dr. Relling/Creative Commons License.