Flexing your muscles was a weird myth I hadn't heard before, but it's not hard to trap a mosquito on your skin by stretching the skin with two fingers. You have to find the right grip, stretch the skin quite hard and not let go.
It takes some time, you will get a mosquito bite from it, but it doesn't end well for the mosquito which you may or may not find satisfaction in. It might help being young and a bit bored.
Weird thing is, it’s not a myth. Maybe flexing muscles is the same mechanism you describe where it’s stretching the skin. I think the PhD author hasn’t spent enough time in the gym to have muscles large enough to adequately stretch skin :)
As kids we would tell each other about the flex trick, it worked fine on tiger mosquitoes for example. The reason we didn't continue is that it would cause a larger more aggravating welt.
Fascinating. Never heard about it before. Do you have to wait for one to settle at exactly the right spot, or is it more forgiving? Which muscles is the easiest?
Can confirm the young and bored portion. We used to do this when camping as a kid. Also if you're careful you can pinch the skin and hold them in place as well.
Having grown up in the southern swamps of Florida. I don't mind mosquitoes too much. If I get bit, it itches for a second and then goes away. Now the sand flies of New Zealand...those bastards can go straight to hell. One of those bites me and I have a welt for a couple weeks.
I find that mosquitos from different regions affect me quite differently. So for example NZ and AUS mosquitos barely register while German ones itch quit a lot.
Fully agreed on the sandflies. They actually relate to the topic at hand. Sandflies don't stop sucking unless shooed away. A couple of years ago we were talking to an older couple who lived in fjordland. They had moved away when their first kid was born, because the baby could not chase the sandflies away, so was tormented by sandflies which would sit on it and suck until exploded.
Blackflies will take little bites, its the deer/horse flies that take chunks. One time while camping far away from modern civilization,
on a lake engulfed in the absolute silence of nothingness nearby, I swear I could hear the teeny tiny crunch of one taking a bite out of my thigh, cellulite and all.
Ah so I must have mistaken the species. I've had a good chunk bitten out of my lower leg where the shinbone sits right below the skin and it took forever to heal. The locals jokingly called them the Canadian Airforce.
Mosquitoes, the only creatures that won't trigger our "stop doing experiments on them" sense.
Behold the greedy gluttons pop like balloons and keep at it anyway. With the vast intellect of a cloud, nothing in their minuscule brain cell find anything odd about the fact that they are getting flooded in "food". Even if the nerves of the abdomen are severed, they are ignoring every other movement and stimuli, gotta chug.
> The adult females of most species have tube-like mouthparts (called a proboscis) that can pierce the skin of a host and feed on blood, which contains protein and iron needed to produce eggs. Thousands of mosquito species feed on the blood of various hosts — vertebrates, including mammals, birds [..]
> Males typically live for about 5–7 days, feeding on nectar and other sources of sugar. After obtaining a full blood meal, the female will rest for a few days while the blood is digested and eggs are developed.
I ran into the same issue. Opening the video link in Chrome incognito works. Going directly to the video link after visiting the article (with blocked embedded video) causes a connection refused error to YouTube.
I haven't seen this with YouTube before. It must have to do with the embed settings being disabled for the video and a cookie getting set. If the cookie is present, the connection to the server is refused.
"I used a pair of forceps to pin the mosquito down on its side and a second pair to pinch the abdomen (pictured above), crushing the ventral nerve cord. The next day, I let the mosquitoes feed on my arm, as we do routinely in our laboratory"
Which makes me wonder, how was the mosquito able to live, let a lone function, the whole day with it's ventral nerve cord destroyed?
> The first ever exploding mosquitoes can be attributed to Robert Gwadz, Ph.D., in a discovery that was made through basic laboratory research over 50 years ago. He found that making an incision in the ventral nerve cord of a mosquito cuts off the signal to stop feeding, giving it an unquenchable thirst for blood. Mosquitoes that have undergone this procedure can drink in excess of four times their weight and may eventually burst. This led Gwadz to a hypothesis that blood ingestion is regulated by abdominal stretch receptors that prevent mosquitoes from (quite literally) drinking themselves to death.
> making an incision in the ventral nerve cord of a mosquito
I find it absolutely wild that we can perform neurological surgery on mosquitos. That is so amazing. I tried to find some references on the surgical instruments. This one article describes the process of dissecting a fly's nervous system without taking it out -- tldr: nail it to a mount and split its back and remove the organs and there it it:
It is not difficult - you need a binocular, forceps, small sharp scalpel and steady hands. If you know what you are doing it only takes around 20 min to dissect a nerve cord, and the most tricky part is fixating the insect. A mosquito is still quite big, I’ve had colleagues who would dissect drosophila larvae, this is where you are approaching the limits of doable preparations.
Is it true mosquitoes are not a keystone species? While bug season hasn’t launched its 2023 War on having a nice time outside yet in the Midwest, just curious if this is a vital disease vector for natural population control of certain other species.
I recall reading a news article a while back about, I think, Aedes control measures being taken. And CA has a decent website outlining control strategies[1], as well as a dedicated website for West Nile virus control[2].
Meanwhile at least one private company and at least one California city have released Wolbachia-infected mosquitos [3],[4] or are seeking approval to release GMO mosquitos [5] to control viral transmission or Aedes breeding.
And Alameda county, at least, has a decent webpage up outlining its program [6].
Mosquito control, in general, is probably somewhat complicated by not wanting to eradicate the native mosquito species.
A guy I know from one of the car forums was talking about how he'd dug a new pond on his farm, in a particularly mosquito-infested part of California.
"You're mad", everyone said, "you're just making a perfect breeding ground for mosquitoes, with that big pool and the trees providing shade!" And indeed, the mosquitoes flocked there and bred like crazy. Mosquitoes all over.
Before long, his beautiful new pond was absolutely hoaching with mosquito larvae, which the carp he'd stocked it with ate like they'd heard it was getting banned.
Now there aren't any mosquitoes for about a three mile radius.
Mostquito-larva-eating fish have often been intentionally deployed for mosquito control, though the use of non-native species may have sometimes backfired:
I’m in so cal and last summer tested many solutions. I have one that works. A CO2 based trap (I use BIOGENTS BG-Mosquitaire CO2... https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09884YS4H).
It eliminated the issue in my house and yard. I got 2 neighbors to get them and we now have a sort of shield up over the neighborhood.
I got a 20lb CO2 tank, and have to fill it up every 30 days or so during the summer months.
It is not cheap or easy, but damn it works. Highly recommend if you hit your limit.
Nothing in the animal kingdom has purpose, only accidental functions which luckily support the accidental functions of other things. To self-replicate, to be sure; to eat and be eaten, primarily, is the purpose of most animals in terms of where they "fit in."
Entire ecosystems are regulated by or around them. Hugely influential life beings.
They filter and clean huge amounts of freshwater. Males pollinate plants. They are responsible of massive energy interchanges between vertebrates and invertebrates in all directions and nodes of the trophic chains. Thousands of species of animals depend on them directly or indirectly.
This is not scientifically well supported, on a account of "maybe we can just kill them all"[1,2] is a question surrounding whether we deploy the gene-drive bioweapon against them[3].
The counter-argument leans heavily on the vague feeling that we shouldn't do this, rather then much concrete-evidence this would really be a problem. And the communities blighted by mosquito-born pathogens (which covers a huge chunk of human civilization on the planet) I suspect are only restrained on account of the lack of money and technology to implement it themselves.
IMO the question is going to be answered for us at some point: a sufficiently virulent, mosquito born disease will emerge (or just be Zika, with mosquito carriers moving into 1st world areas on the back of climate change) and the answer will rapidly become yes.
Inform yourself better. We have more than a vague feeling that they play a major role on many ecosystems.
Zoologists study this animals since XIX century at least and there is a pile of literature about them bigger than the Liberty statue. Mosquito life cycle in particular is middle-school grade knowledge.
One catch they also kill more than half a million people every year. A small price to pay you say? I say burn all of mosquitos every single one to ashes.
The CDC did as well [1]. In fact, the extermination of disease carrying mosquitos was part of their founding charter [2] which they achieved in the US with a smashing success.
Enough time has passed to show that the direct biosphere effects of exterminating disease carrying mosquitos are basically undetectable. For that matter, history has even showed that the biosphere effects of the eradication process via drainage and mass DDT application were relatively minor in the long run.
> the direct biosphere effects of exterminating disease carrying mosquitos are basically undetectable
I would say basically unreported
Near one third of the species of freshwater fishes extant in the whole planet face extinction currently.
Of those, all the freshwater species of megafishes (all species reaching 30Kg) reduced their population by 94% in the last 50 years. Some, like the Chinese Paddlefish (one of the biggest freshwater fishes known in the planet, 7m long) went extinct.
Rivers provide a 25% of the food that we humans, eat, and 200 millions of people rely directly on freshwater fishes as main source of proteins in the diet.
Before to start rolling this shitball of consequences downhill, we need to remind ourselves that the danger is not negligible, not at all, and that the outcome would be unpredictable and irreversible. There are "a million multiverses" in what such drastic and irresponsible actions could return and bite us hard in the gorge.
Mao did not try the exact same thing lets stop with the BS first of all. Last I checked China is doing fine. I was obviously exaggerating when I said all but I honestly think that all diseases carrying mosquito types should be completely eradicated. This is not a laughing matter imo and not a time to act like a psychopath.
Mosquito borne disease situation is dire in a lot of Asian and African countries. May be if you lose loved one your idea will change.
I don't think you are smart enough to understand that what you're saying and what he tried are equivalent.
Reminder for what you said:
> One catch they also kill more than half a million people every year. A small price to pay you say? I say burn all of mosquitos every single one to ashes.
What Mao did:
> The "Four Pests" campaign was introduced in 1958 as a hygiene campaign aimed to eradicate the pests responsible for the transmission of pestilence and disease:
> - the mosquitos responsible for malaria
> - the rodents that spread the plague
> - the pervasive airborne flies
> - the sparrows—specifically the Eurasian tree sparrow—which ate grain seed and fruit
I believe your position on mosquitos is directly equivalent to Mao's position, in every way. Don't tell other people they don't understand you when they clearly do, much better than yourself apparently.
You're welcome to prove to me how someone whose position is to kill mosquitos because of X number of deaths a year is not 1:1 with Mao's position of killing mosquitos because of the very thing that kills those people every year.
Seems like it refers to bio-energy exchange - the mosquitos eat something, other animals eat the mosquitos. Another way of saying they are a major part of the food chain.
Leaving bullshit unchallenged isn't the purpose of this site. Explain exactly how mosquitoes "filter and clean huge amounts of freshwater," or cite appropriate credible research.
The same purpose as the grain of sand on the beach under the one on top of it, on top of the one below it. The grain is where it is after it found a solid foundation for it to rest on. The grain on top of it in turn rests on the ones below, and so forth - it is grains of sand all the way down and up.
It takes some time, you will get a mosquito bite from it, but it doesn't end well for the mosquito which you may or may not find satisfaction in. It might help being young and a bit bored.