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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.
If this is happening due to many humans being in even smaller spaces, why the hell does the insect need color vision, and the ability to smell humans from even FARTHER away? I don't see how that need could have evolved to be beneficial... the speed thing I can see... I'm truly confused as to why such a feature would evolve with seemingly no benefit.
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Programming is like sex... Make one mistake and support it the rest of your life.
The most potent repellent chemical were then isolated by strapping miniature electrodes to the antennae of female mosquitoes and checking their responses to specific compounds. Logan will not divulge the names of the chemicals until they are patented.
How in the world can a chemical that every human produces be patented? Isn't that prior art? Ridiculous. I could understand if it were some new compound they synthesized, but this is a nothing more than greed.
Dan East
Better known as 318230.
Generally when somebody says their all-natural product 'compares favorably' to some chemical alternative, them mean that it works 'almost as well'. If it worked better, they'd be saying that it works better than DEET.
In my experience, DEET does absolutely nothing to repel biting insects from me. If this new stuff 'compares favorably' to DEET, I guess I have nothing to look forward to here.
It doesn't really have to work though... He just needs to put 'Organic' on the bottle, and people will buy it even if they have no clue what the hell is in there. They'll swear it works too.
How much larger is a 3 microgram mosquito? I think a percentage would be slightly more informative, or at least the weight of a "normal" mosquito.
But don't worry, pretty soon people will be complaining about the glut of birds feeding on the skeeters followed by the glut of cats eating the birds, followed by....
And then the gorillas freeze to death?
i'd hit it so hard, if you pulled me out you'd be the king of britain [bash.org]
So that means that the mosquitoes are about 0.1% bigger than average... Wow. North Americans must be pretty dangerous, then, if 0.1% larger in weight makes one "Super"
Bring back DDT and mosquitos go away. So do upwards of 2 million malaria deaths per year, a totally preventable third-world genocide caused entirely by that evil idiot Rachel Carson and perpetuated by environmentalist morons.
after I figured they had enough blood, I would pick them off by the leg and let them fly away.
There's merit to what you say, as I became immune to poison ivy, likely from all the contact i had with it, but posion ivy won't give you a host of diseases if you come in contact with it, which a mosquito might.
Just a small note: most mammals are bichromats (except a large swath of primates, including us... and we are just barely trichromats). But most other land vertebrates are quadchromats. There is a nice article on this in the latest Scientific American. Note that this is in the print edition, and so the full article is not available free online.