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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.
Growing up, I was ravaged by mosquitoes daily in the summers. There were years when they were particularly bad and they would literally swarm you. They were huge too. If you think it's cold in Minnesota and we don't have mosquitoes, you're wrong. They just had to be that much bigger and drink that much more blood to survive. You would be out playing baseball and three of them would hold you down while another worked his proboscis through your breastplate directly into your heart. Often times there wouldn't be much left of me but skin and bones when I got home. And that was if you were lucky. If there were six or more, oftentimes they'd just grab your shoulders and carry you back to their nest and you'd never be seen again.
If you have someone that loves "all of God's creatures" then you should throw them in pond filled with mosquitoes and see how long it takes them to become a killing machine. Not very long I'd wager. In fact, mosquitoes are pretty good proof that there is no god. Why would a being of infinite good unleash such a horrible plague upon man?
It seemed that the people who produced the most sweat and breathed the hardest were the most attractive. These features seem to come hand in hand with being overweight but I never really bought the idea that overweight people's blood tasted better. If that were true, all the mosquitoes would have moved to Wisconsin.
Instead, you'd have mosquitoes buzzing around your mouth & ears. Why? Because I guess they are attracted to carbon dioxide big time. You accumulate natural carbon dioxide in the wells of your ears and it pours out of your mouth. They also somehow detect lactic acid which you'll find about large animals.
For those of you who don't know, mosquitoes breed in water (when the eggs hatch, they look like this). Not moving water, but standing water. One of the tasks I used to have was laying silage down, putting a tarp over it and weighting the tarp down with old tires. Invariably, rainfall would fill the insides of the tires with just enough water to make them each a breeding well for mosquitoes. It's not a fun job but you have to make sure that all that old scummy water is emptied out otherwise you'd find yourself engulfed with mosquitoes at the end of the summer.
I've never underestimated mosquitoes, I think they need to be very good at detecting carbon dioxide, scents, heat & water vapor in order to successfully find food for their eggs and lay them. This is quite a task considering what they've got and I think that it's amazing they manage to reproduce at all. I dream of the day when mosquitoes are endangered organisms.
*mental note* Do not hold Olympic summer games in Athens, Greece.
My work here is dung.
Your name is strikingly apropos to the subject, my friend.
I may make you feel, but I can't make you think.
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.
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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.
This speaks nothing to the possiblity that Athenians are getting smaller, slower, and smellier.
As a rule, I never trust dark brown ketchup.
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.
...live in the city. The air quality is so bad here I'd be amazed if any mosquitoe could survive long term.
Helloooooo? Athens is a city .
so try a old tech solution. get a block of dry ice, throw it in a cooler and put the cooler in the back corner of your yard.
Voila 90% of the mosquitos go over there to die as a giant source of Co2 means lots of good things to eat to the little buggers.
My grandfather was doing this a decade ago.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
That's got to be doing something to the humans as well. Might we be breeding people who need air pollution to live? If so, then cleaning up the environment could be like genocide!
It's not the size, is the quantity. We had big, even HUGE mosquitoes in Michigan, but it was the tenacious little bitsy ones that appeared in great quantities and stung the most. Smaller mosquitoes also are able to get through smaller holes and gaps and were typically the ones found indoors.
It's been said "Intimidation is being in a dark room with a mosquito." As tired as you may be, lying in bed, there's something about that faint whine that can make the most tired very alert.
I like Dave Barry's line about armor piercing stealth mosquitoes and think this is what the Greeks are up to. Screw the North Koreans, it's the greeks we need to keep an eye on.
One last thing: Ponds are filled with mosquitoes. Larvae perhaps, but not the adults. Mosquitoes prefer long grass or shade, which is why it's often a good idea to just write off the golfball hit into the brush or edge or woods. Worst around ponds are deer flies, which I used to refer to as Flying Bastards
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Or since this is Slashdot, maybe a more high-tech colution.
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Hell, I can tell you that without reading the article.
Mosquitoes like:
-that humans have blood
Mosquitoes hate:
-that humans squash them
There you go.
Mosquitos can bite me all day long and I never get a welt. My mother on the other hand, gets two bites and puffs up like the Michelin Man (TM).
I am convinced that I do NOT have a natural resistance to mosquito venom, rather I believe that I have 'tuned' my body to be resistant. You see, growing up as a child I had the idea in my head (don't know how it got there), that if I just let the mosquitos bite me that eventually my body would adapt and become resistant. So while everybody else was slapping their arms and waving their hands about in the air, I would sit there and let them suck away... after I figured they had enough blood, I would pick them off by the leg and let them fly away.
Is there any merit to this? I'm not sure, but I can tell you that I USED to swell up after begin bitten, but NOW I'm all but immune.
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
far...out
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).
That sounds like a great way to:
1. Breed DDT-resistant mosquitos
2. Contaminate the groundwater for generations, leading to
3. Retarded children and children with other developmental disabilities
4. Massive environmental damage, especially massive bird die-off
It's amazing how many great ideas you can have when you stop believing those so-called "scientists" and "researchers"
"Any connection between your reality and mine is purely coincidental." -Slashdot
These so-called midges are a marketing ploy. Ever noticed they are only around when the pubs are open? As long as you stay inside and drink beer you're ok - and who's benefiting from that? The brewers! My guess is they grow them in these huge containers you see at breweries and distribute them with their delivery trucks, pouring them out all over city's villages and countryside through the exhaust pipe, masking as diesel fumes.