10 ms·

When a mosquito can’t stop drinking blood, the result isn’t pretty

143 points by sohkamyung 4y ago

Flatcircle 4y ago
Invasive Mosquitos are ruining California and not enough people are talking about it. It's a terrible quality of life issue and it doesn't seem like any politicians have the will to act until a major disease outbreak occurs.
- anonymouskimmer 4y ago
  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. 1 - https://www.cdph.ca.gov/Programs/CID/DCDC/Pages/MosquitoesandMosquitoBorneDiseases.aspx# https://www.cdph.ca.gov/Programs/CID/DCDC/Pages/Mosquitoesan... 2 - https://westnile.ca.gov/ https://westnile.ca.gov/ 3 - https://www.businessinsider.com/wolbachia-mosquitoes-california-google-alphabet-2017-7?op=1 https://www.businessinsider.com/wolbachia-mosquitoes-califor... 4 - https://www.wired.com/2016/08/california-city-fending-off-zika-releasing-40000-mosquitoes-every-week/ https://www.wired.com/2016/08/california-city-fending-off-zi... 5 - https://www.californiamosquitoproject.com/ https://www.californiamosquitoproject.com/ 6 - https://www.mosquitoes.org/programs https://www.mosquitoes.org/programs
- Gordonjcp 4y ago
  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.
  - belfalas 4y ago
    I had never seen or heard the word 'hoaching' before today - "full of or swarming with people and things." That's a good one, thanks!
    - Gordonjcp 4y ago
      A good Scots word.
  - notahacker 4y ago
    Carp as vector control! That's a great counter-intuitive way of dealing with pests...
    - gojomo 4y ago
      Mostquito-larva-eating fish have often been intentionally deployed for mosquito control, though the use of non-native species may have sometimes backfired: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mosquitofish#Environmental_impact https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mosquitofish#Environmental_imp...
- mchusma 4y ago
  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 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.
stametseater 4y ago
May they choke on it.
jvm___ 4y ago
There's a farside cartoon where one mosquito is about to explode and the other one is yelling "It's an Artery, pull out!"
- PaulAJ 4y ago
  Here: https://i.pinimg.com/originals/36/ad/9f/36ad9f245cf7b76cccd5cea22815921d.jpg https://i.pinimg.com/originals/36/ad/9f/36ad9f245cf7b76cccd5...
xorcist 4y ago
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.
- DwnVoteHoneyPot 4y ago
  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 :)
  - fatfingerd 4y ago
    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.
    - sonofhans 4y ago
      Yes, I’d expect this trick to leave some of the mosquito proboscis in the wound. It sounds like an awful idea.
  - xorcist 4y ago
    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?
    - DwnVoteHoneyPot 4y ago
      Biceps for best viewing.
  - kevviiinn 4y ago
zevv 4y ago
"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?
- ycombinete 4y ago
  Its head and thorax were still functioning just fine. Just the abdomen was insensate.
  - Titan2189 4y ago
    More like 'insatiable'
h4ch1 4y ago
What's the purpose of mosquitoes in the animal kingdom?
- m3kw9 4y ago
  food for other animal(fish)/insects
- at_a_remove 4y ago
  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."
- meindnoch 4y ago
  To make new mosquitoes.
- eric-hu 4y ago
  One could make a case that they spread diseases that kept humans in check in certain parts of the world, until modern medicine came to be.
- turtledragonfly 4y ago
  That's an interesting re-phrasing of the age-old question "what's the purpose of life?" (:
- bproven 4y ago
  what is the purpose of humans in the animal kingdom? ;)
  - Kye 4y ago
    Finding and eating alien life.
  - pelagic_sky 4y ago
    To feed mosquitoes
falsaberN1 4y ago
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.
- thaumasiotes 4y ago
  > nothing in their minuscule brain cell find anything odd about the fact that they are getting flooded in "food". Mosquitos don't eat blood. It's not food.
  - justsomehnguy 4y ago
    > 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 live on Earth-32453, where are you from?
can16358p 4y ago
For the record: When a mosquito *can* stop drinking blood, the result isn’t pretty either. Can we all agree that anything about mosquitos isn't pretty anyway?
pelagic_sky 4y ago
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.
- cycomanic 4y ago
  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.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - inglor_cz 4y ago
    Central European mosquitos are nasty. I hate every single bite.
  - thaumasiotes 4y ago
    > Sandflies don't stop sucking unless shooed away. Shooed away? Wouldn't you swat them?
- jacquesm 4y ago
  Canadian blackflies will happily tear out off a chunk of meat. Or at least, that's what it feels like.
  - morkalork 4y ago
    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.
throwaway81523 4y ago
Obligatory Far Side (meme repo before xkcd was invented): https://img.allw.mn/content/tq/r9/sqxpfzc1_554x608.jpg https://img.allw.mn/content/tq/r9/sqxpfzc1_554x608.jpg
thxg 4y ago
The video link in the article works in Chrome but not Firefox mobile (for some reason I can't comprehend). Working link in case you are interested: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ujjkbLZETHs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ujjkbLZETHs
- simple10 4y ago
  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.
- gojomo 4y ago
  Also doesn't work in (Chromium-based) Brave. Might be Google product-tying its YouTube dominance to Chrome dominance.
qwertox 4y ago
So this isn't something that normally occurs. > 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.
- eternalban 4y ago
  > 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: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3197069/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3197069/
  - lycopodiopsida 4y ago
    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.
    - eternalban 4y ago
      Thanks! Well, I'm still impressed with even the germinal ambition of "I wonder if we can dissect tiny insects". Was it 19th or 20th century?
exabrial 4y ago
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.
kazinator 4y ago
> An urban legend says that if you tense your muscle when a mosquito bites you and feeds on your blood, it can swell up and explode That is indeed implausible. The correct method is to pinch the skin around it so it can't remove its proboscis.

143 points by sohkamyung 4y ago

Invasive Mosquitos are ruining California and not enough people are talking about it. It's a terrible quality of life issue and it doesn't seem like any politicians have the will to act until a major disease outbreak occurs.

anonymouskimmer 4y ago
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. 1 - https://www.cdph.ca.gov/Programs/CID/DCDC/Pages/MosquitoesandMosquitoBorneDiseases.aspx# https://www.cdph.ca.gov/Programs/CID/DCDC/Pages/Mosquitoesan... 2 - https://westnile.ca.gov/ https://westnile.ca.gov/ 3 - https://www.businessinsider.com/wolbachia-mosquitoes-california-google-alphabet-2017-7?op=1 https://www.businessinsider.com/wolbachia-mosquitoes-califor... 4 - https://www.wired.com/2016/08/california-city-fending-off-zika-releasing-40000-mosquitoes-every-week/ https://www.wired.com/2016/08/california-city-fending-off-zi... 5 - https://www.californiamosquitoproject.com/ https://www.californiamosquitoproject.com/ 6 - https://www.mosquitoes.org/programs https://www.mosquitoes.org/programs
Gordonjcp 4y ago
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.
- belfalas 4y ago
  I had never seen or heard the word 'hoaching' before today - "full of or swarming with people and things." That's a good one, thanks!
  - Gordonjcp 4y ago
    A good Scots word.
- notahacker 4y ago
  Carp as vector control! That's a great counter-intuitive way of dealing with pests...
  - gojomo 4y ago
    Mostquito-larva-eating fish have often been intentionally deployed for mosquito control, though the use of non-native species may have sometimes backfired: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mosquitofish#Environmental_impact https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mosquitofish#Environmental_imp...
mchusma 4y ago
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 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.

stametseater 4y ago

May they choke on it.

jvm___ 4y ago

There's a farside cartoon where one mosquito is about to explode and the other one is yelling "It's an Artery, pull out!"

PaulAJ 4y ago
Here: https://i.pinimg.com/originals/36/ad/9f/36ad9f245cf7b76cccd5cea22815921d.jpg https://i.pinimg.com/originals/36/ad/9f/36ad9f245cf7b76cccd5...

xorcist 4y ago

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.

DwnVoteHoneyPot 4y ago
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 :)
- fatfingerd 4y ago
  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.
  - sonofhans 4y ago
    Yes, I’d expect this trick to leave some of the mosquito proboscis in the wound. It sounds like an awful idea.
- xorcist 4y ago
  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?
  - DwnVoteHoneyPot 4y ago
    Biceps for best viewing.
- kevviiinn 4y ago

zevv 4y ago

"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?

ycombinete 4y ago
Its head and thorax were still functioning just fine. Just the abdomen was insensate.
- Titan2189 4y ago
  More like 'insatiable'

h4ch1 4y ago

What's the purpose of mosquitoes in the animal kingdom?

m3kw9 4y ago
food for other animal(fish)/insects
at_a_remove 4y ago
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."
meindnoch 4y ago
To make new mosquitoes.
eric-hu 4y ago
One could make a case that they spread diseases that kept humans in check in certain parts of the world, until modern medicine came to be.
turtledragonfly 4y ago
That's an interesting re-phrasing of the age-old question "what's the purpose of life?" (:
bproven 4y ago
what is the purpose of humans in the animal kingdom? ;)
- Kye 4y ago
  Finding and eating alien life.
- pelagic_sky 4y ago
  To feed mosquitoes

falsaberN1 4y ago

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.

thaumasiotes 4y ago
> nothing in their minuscule brain cell find anything odd about the fact that they are getting flooded in "food". Mosquitos don't eat blood. It's not food.
- justsomehnguy 4y ago
  > 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 live on Earth-32453, where are you from?

can16358p 4y ago

For the record: When a mosquito *can* stop drinking blood, the result isn’t pretty either. Can we all agree that anything about mosquitos isn't pretty anyway?

pelagic_sky 4y ago

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.

cycomanic 4y ago
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.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- inglor_cz 4y ago
  Central European mosquitos are nasty. I hate every single bite.
- thaumasiotes 4y ago
  > Sandflies don't stop sucking unless shooed away. Shooed away? Wouldn't you swat them?
jacquesm 4y ago
Canadian blackflies will happily tear out off a chunk of meat. Or at least, that's what it feels like.
- morkalork 4y ago
  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.

throwaway81523 4y ago

Obligatory Far Side (meme repo before xkcd was invented): https://img.allw.mn/content/tq/r9/sqxpfzc1_554x608.jpg https://img.allw.mn/content/tq/r9/sqxpfzc1_554x608.jpg

thxg 4y ago

The video link in the article works in Chrome but not Firefox mobile (for some reason I can't comprehend). Working link in case you are interested: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ujjkbLZETHs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ujjkbLZETHs

simple10 4y ago
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.
gojomo 4y ago
Also doesn't work in (Chromium-based) Brave. Might be Google product-tying its YouTube dominance to Chrome dominance.

qwertox 4y ago

So this isn't something that normally occurs. > 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.

eternalban 4y ago
> 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: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3197069/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3197069/
- lycopodiopsida 4y ago
  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.
  - eternalban 4y ago
    Thanks! Well, I'm still impressed with even the germinal ambition of "I wonder if we can dissect tiny insects". Was it 19th or 20th century?

exabrial 4y ago

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.

kazinator 4y ago

> An urban legend says that if you tense your muscle when a mosquito bites you and feeds on your blood, it can swell up and explode That is indeed implausible. The correct method is to pinch the skin around it so it can't remove its proboscis.