Or is it that the victims pest warning system is currently winning the biological arms race, in which case how are mosquitoes able to successfully reproduce? Or is it that mosquitoes have evolved such that their spawning numbers offset the difficulty they have biting?
Biology is hard.
You can feel a mosquito feeding on you?
i can, often. you can’t?
They have! For the most part you don’t even notice mosquitoes biting you until after they’re long gone, the part that itches is from the mosquitoes saliva that is left behind! They have evolved to the point that you should never even feel them sticking their proboscis into you so if you actually catch one biting you it’s probably because something went wrong or you just happened to see it land
If only they evolved to not emit high pitch irritating noise.
Does vary by mosquito species but yeah for the most part.
Alpine mosquitoes with shorter seasons tend to have swarming strategy, they’re loud and you notice when they land on you. It’s just that there’s about 1-200 of them flying about you so lots will still be successful. These ones mostly don’t spread disease but they ruin a hike.
The sneakiest ones are in the tropics and are the species that spread malaria and other disease.
If you’re aware enough, you can feel one landing on you. Easier to do if you’re aware there’s one in the room and you try to focus. No real way for them to evolve around that.
You only feel the ones that you can feel. The goddamn ninja mosquitoes permeate the air we breathe. They’re constantly feeding on us — sapping our life force — and we never even notice.
Well duh. It takes a ninja to sense a ninja. Visit your local dojo to learn more!
Evolution doesn’t work that way. They don’t evolve X because of Y. They develop essentially random mutations, and the ones that make them fitter for survival get passed on to their offspring. They don’t get to decide that they don’t want you to itch and then evolve that ability.
It’s a common rhetorical shortcut to anthropomorphize evolution. Doing so doesn’t necessarily indicate that the writer doesn’t understand how evolution works. It’s just cumbersome to repeat an explanation of random mutation and natural selection in every discussion of evolved trait.
Neither creatures nor evolution get to “decide” to develop a trait but, as countless evolutionary arms races show, useful traits and refinements do tend to happen in a way that evokes a sense of conscious decision making.
I meant as the ones that have mutations that cause them to itch get whacked, the remaining ones that dont get to pass on this trait to their offspring,creating a generation of itchless bugs, not that this mosquito one day decides to evolve a non itching bite because he thinks it might benefit his bloodline.
The itch doesn’t begin until well after the female mosquito gets her food and leaves, so what reproductive advantage does it give to that specific mosquito over the others to make the itch not happen at all? The answer is “none”.
They have, the ones that irritate you either make an error or your body has a bad reaction to something in their bite.
They didn’t need to.
Most mosquito bites I get I don’t find out about until hours later.
Their needle is actually 6 different appendages. Shit is highly evolved
They do a really shitty job of ‘not irritating’ your skin. They get it right half the time. The only biological success they’ve had in evolution is that they are so freaking numerous. Ask a northern Ontarian Indigenous person who grew up in rocky swamps … you haven’t seen mosquitoes until you’ve breathed in clouds of them.
That sounds awful. How do you guys manage? Just stay indoors?
I gave up on anything but DEET years ago. If they’re real bad though even that sometimes isn’t enough. That’s face net and baggy full body clothing time.
clouds of them
Baby, you got
a stewburgers goingYou speak truth.
Hello from the hell-swamps of Louisiana, where it’s Summer for 8-10 months a year and the mosquitos are an omnipresent scourge.
Bonus swarm: termite flights so densely packed that they show up as “weather” on radar.
Our summers up here are at their peak in June and July and on hot still windless evenings if you are caught out in the wild, it’s torturous. I can’t imagine what it would be like down there with a longer hot season. There’s a city near here called North Bay where every July the city on the shores of a large lake gets infested with swarms of shad flies, harmless bugs but so thick and numerous that the place ends up smelling like a giant tin of tuna.
I am sure I read somewhere that they defecate in the hole after they have drawn blood and that is what causes the irritation. That does not sound as if they are particularly worried about being regarded as annoying, in fact it feels like they see it as a bonus.
That sounds completely made up. Why would they do that?
Dominance.
My understanding is that when they bite you, they also inject a bit of anticoagulant to prevent clotting as they suck blood out. The foreign material creates an allergic reaction that itches.
I don’t think there would be much of an evolutionary advantage to irritating your victim until they start a pesticidal war against you and your kind.
Bitch they don’t care about your irritation, what in the hell has gotten into you 🤔
Neither do viruses, but as we’ve observed, they evolve too. Y’know, preserve their species and all that.
A mosquito, by the sounds of it.
