In case you are wondering what I am talking about; it is the mosquitoes!! Oh how I hate those creepy tiny things that keep roaming around you and never give up until they have sucked up your blood or died trying.

It seems to me that they hibernate right under your nose and at the first sign of warmth and heat, they go into feeding frenzy mode and they are all over you. No matter what you use from insecticides; they still find a way around it and get to your blood.

As mush as I hate these tiny pests; I am fascinated by their construction and persistence. As light and insignificant they are; they are more complicated than you think; just some of the strange facts about them; get this: mosquitoes are responsible for the most human deaths world-wide!

They prefer children to adults and blondes to brunettes; so the argument I used to get from my sisters was a valid one. You see, they have skin color that is way lighter than mine and you can say they tend to be blonde while I am a brunette, so it makes sense now.

Mosquitoes can detect a moving target that is 15 ft away! Can you imagine that? So if I was in a room and the mosquito was in the next room, it will detect my movement and come for my blood; talk about scary!

The average life span of the mosquito is 3 – 100 days and she is the blood sucker; on the other hand; her male peer has a life span of 10 – 20 days and does not suck blood; interesting, ha?

A mosquito can smell its live host (that is basically us humans or any live animals) from a distance of 20 – 35 m! Boy! We really don’t stand a chance with them.

Mosquitoes don’t see very well, but they zoom in like a heat-seeking missile. In the spherical arrangement of their compound eyes, blind spots separate each eye from the next one. As a result, they can’t see you until they are 30 feet (10 meters) away. Even then, they have trouble distinguishing you from any object of similar size and shape: tree stump, 55-gallon drum, etc. When they are 10 feet (3 meters) away they use extremely sensitive thermal receptors on the tip of their antennae to locate blood near the surface of the skin. The range of these receptors increases threefold when the humidity is high.

The most fascinating fact I learned about these creatures is that although they are into blood sucking; they do not transfer AIDS from someone infected to someone who is not. Studies with HIV clearly show that the virus responsible for the AIDS infection is regarded as food to the mosquito and is digested along with the blood meal.

Mosquitoes Do Not Ingest Enough HIV Particles to Transmit AIDS by Contamination.
An AIDS-free individual would have to be bitten by 10 million mosquitoes that had begun feeding on an AIDS carrier to receive a single unit of HIV from contaminated mosquito mouth parts. Most people have heard that mosquitoes regurgitate saliva before they feed, but are unaware that the food canal and salivary canal are separate passageways in the mosquito. The mosquito’s feeding apparatus is an extremely complicated structure that is totally unlike the crude single-bore syringe. Unlike a syringe, the mosquito delivers salivary fluid through one passage and draws blood up another. As a result, the food canal is not flushed out like a used needle, and blood flow is always unidirectional. The mechanics involved in mosquito feeding are totally unlike the mechanisms employed by the drug user’s needles. In short, mosquitoes are not flying hypodermic needles and a mosquito that disgorges saliva into your body is not flushing out the remnants of its last blood meal.

Ok! It is cool to learn more facts about these creatures that disrupt your sleep almost every night in the summer. They suck your blood and feed on it leaving you with a mark that can easily turn into a scar if you mess with it. To me; I would rather that the mosquito sucks my blood and leave me alone to go back to sleep than roam around my ear with this annoying wizzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz sound; what is it with mosquitoes and ears? Isn’t it enough that they are feeding on us that they have to always rub it in? why do we have to be awake for them to get the job done? Damn! I really hate mosquitoes!!!

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