4 ms·

Not sure if it was Siberia exactly, but I was watching a clip from some nature documentary in a generally cold-and-north region and seeing massive swarms of mos

Not sure if it was Siberia exactly, but I was watching a clip from some nature documentary in a generally cold-and-north region and seeing massive swarms of mosquitoes weakening animals. I've lived in the southeast US my whole life and I thought mosquitoes were bad here in thesummer.

rpeden 6y ago
Could it have been black flies instead of mosquitoes? Blood is their favorite meal and they're known to swarm humans and animals alike in large numbers: https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Black_Fly_Attack_on_theDubawnt_River_Nunavut.jpg https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Black_Fly_Attack_o... Mosquitoes at least have the courtesy the use a proboscis to remove your blood. Black flies just rip off a chunk of flesh to get what they're after, which I believe is reason that large swarms of them can seriously injure animals.
- trhway 6y ago
  yep, from personal experience :), a 3cm long black fly makes about a 3mm long cut, and it seems it injects something like anticoagulant into the cut, and it can bite even through clothes like jeans where the cloth touches skin, and yes, they come in droves. Wrt. separatism - not in next 50-100 years for any locally grown separatism. Too small number of people on that gigantic territory of too diverse ethnic makeup. With climate change the population will grow and some places becoming nice will get higher population of higher density with some shared identity. That wouldn't be Russians - Russian demographics is falling. No other ethnicity there also have numbers and demographic trend to accomplish it in the observable future. So, most probably it will be Chinese immigrants in the Far East. There are already a lot of them there, and the numbers are growing fast - again nobody else is able to populate and develop those territories with needed intensity, so Russia lets, as there is not much choice really, them come to fill the vacuum so to say. China also considers some of those territories historically theirs. That means that China wouldn't let anybody else to bite that piece. In some decades there will be a period of time when Russia gets into deep crisis (like say change of President because of Putin dying in 2050? :) and that's when the even more powerful China will make the move. A Far East version of Crimea. In a modern Russian fantasy novel (by Pelevin?) about near future the Chinese hieroglyphs naming Russia are directly translated as "temporary administration of the northern gas pipelines" :)

rpeden 6y ago

Could it have been black flies instead of mosquitoes? Blood is their favorite meal and they're known to swarm humans and animals alike in large numbers: https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Black_Fly_Attack_on_theDubawnt_River_Nunavut.jpg https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Black_Fly_Attack_o... Mosquitoes at least have the courtesy the use a proboscis to remove your blood. Black flies just rip off a chunk of flesh to get what they're after, which I believe is reason that large swarms of them can seriously injure animals.

trhway 6y ago
yep, from personal experience :), a 3cm long black fly makes about a 3mm long cut, and it seems it injects something like anticoagulant into the cut, and it can bite even through clothes like jeans where the cloth touches skin, and yes, they come in droves. Wrt. separatism - not in next 50-100 years for any locally grown separatism. Too small number of people on that gigantic territory of too diverse ethnic makeup. With climate change the population will grow and some places becoming nice will get higher population of higher density with some shared identity. That wouldn't be Russians - Russian demographics is falling. No other ethnicity there also have numbers and demographic trend to accomplish it in the observable future. So, most probably it will be Chinese immigrants in the Far East. There are already a lot of them there, and the numbers are growing fast - again nobody else is able to populate and develop those territories with needed intensity, so Russia lets, as there is not much choice really, them come to fill the vacuum so to say. China also considers some of those territories historically theirs. That means that China wouldn't let anybody else to bite that piece. In some decades there will be a period of time when Russia gets into deep crisis (like say change of President because of Putin dying in 2050? :) and that's when the even more powerful China will make the move. A Far East version of Crimea. In a modern Russian fantasy novel (by Pelevin?) about near future the Chinese hieroglyphs naming Russia are directly translated as "temporary administration of the northern gas pipelines" :)