Athens Breeding "Super Mosquitoes"

Chemisor writes "Air pollution and cramped housing conditions in Athens, Greece, are creating a new breed of mosquitoes which are bigger, faster, and can smell humans from farther away. The super insects have color vision and detect humans from 25-30 meters, which is about 50% farther than the ordinary mosquitoe. Beating their wing 500 times a second provides them with extra speed, and the larger bodies (by 0.3ug) presumably allow larger bloodsucking capacity." And in a similar vein (har har) New Scientist had a piece about what mosquitoes like or hate about people.

Comments

Color vision

[BWJones]

Regular mosquito species are dichromats. In other words, all mosquitos, like many insects that I know of have color vision. Some insects like bees are actually trichromats (like humans), but have their photopigments tuned higher up in the spectrum. So, super mosquitos having color vision is no different than regular mosquitos, unless they have developed a third chromophore which the article does not state.

Bats, Natures Mosquito Control device

[brufar]

Looks like Athens should be working on increasing their bat population. a single little brown bat such as we have here in the US can catch about 1200 small insects (such as mosquito's) in a single hour. I have built several bat houses to place around my yard to try and increase their population in my local vicinity. and decrease the biting insect population . It will make the back yard a much more enjoyable place and I won't have to spend money on chemicals, propane or electricity to make it happen.

I am convinced that although the electric bug zappers take out a lot of insects, and can be enjoyable to watch, they also seem to attract all the bugs from your neighbors yards into yours..

For more info on Bat conservation and plans to build your own bat house check out Bat Conservation International

From the BatCon FAQ

Most bats are valuable allies, well worth protecting. Worldwide, they are primary predators of vast numbers of insect pests that cost farmers and foresters billions of dollars annually and spread human disease. In the United States, little brown bats often eat mosquitos and can catch up to 1,200 tiny insects in an hour. An average-sized colony of big brown bats can eat enough cucumber beetles to protect farmers from tens of millions of the beetle's rootworm larva each summer. Large colonies of Mexican free-tailed bats eat hundreds of tons of moth pests weekly. Bats play key roles in keeping a wide variety of insect populations in balance. Yet, they rank as North America's most rapidly declining and endangered land mammals. The largest known cause of decline is exaggerated human fear and persecution.

Dragonflies in these parts...

[Civil_Disobedient]

In Maine, we have our own brand of bio-terrorism against the Devil-creatures: dragonflies. The state used to provide homeowners with a batch in the late spring so that by summertime you'd have a glorious army of ravenous winged assasins. I read somewhere that dragonflies eat 20x their body weight in mosquitos a day (no ref., sorry).