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.
The mosquito likely evolved to try, but the body evolves to defend just the same. Your irritation is your own body’s immune response after all.
I hate mosquitoes. I’m one of the people that feel them bite nearly every time, it is painful and the bite they leave behind swells and itches. I’ve clawed skin off because of how irritating it feels. I’ll go outside and they naturally gravitate towards me versus others. Existence is pain.
O blood eh?
mosquito bites are epic
Mosquitoes are not a big problem for me, and their bites do not make me itch.
My kid, however… mosquitoes just swarm him, and the poor thing swells up when he’s bitten.
I’ve noticed that too. When out with friends, some people get bitten more than their fair share.
It depends on blood type. They prefer O’s and +’s
O+ here and I am the magnet.
O- and got swarmed as a kid. A fucking cloud around me and only me :-/
Got bitten so much I developed a resistance or something so there’s that!
Have heard that blood type (O) but not about rhesus (- or +) attracts the bastards.
It’s genetics. We produce some oil or something that mosquitos smell. And some people produce more then others.
Basically bad luck.
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
It would need to be us that needs to evolve away from being sensitive to mosquito saliva. But our immune system went the other way to be allergic to it so we could defend against any infection or disease the bug might carry. Further proof of human stupidity in our evolution, that we trigger the defense mechanism after the the attack instead of preventing it.
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 only they evolved to not emit high pitch irritating noise.
Honestly, I can see it being a selective trait too. Surely loud mosquitos get detected and killed more often
This might be an evolutionary war, since it’s plausible, that detecting mosquitos led to less infestations and thereby to a higher survival rate.
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.
The only good thing that came from mosquitoes was Jurassic Park, which I’m ready to give up if their existence was going to be deleted from the timeline of the universe.
They’re more like goddamn vampire mosquitoes, as they drink our blood
Well duh. It takes a ninja to sense a ninja. Visit your local dojo to learn more!
You can feel a mosquito feeding on you?
i can, often. you can’t?
I did not know there were people who could not feel this 😬
Well of course, and if the cases you don’t feel it in the moment, you inevitably feel it a minute later
They have, the ones that irritate you either make an error or your body has a bad reaction to something in their bite.
Their needle is actually 6 different appendages. Shit is highly evolved
Most mosquito bites I get I don’t find out about until hours later.
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”.
When I start itching from a bite, I’ll go on a killing spree and the one that bit me is most likely to meet its demise. But maybe that’s just me
Animals don’t do this, and humans are not the only prey for mosquitos. Also humans live in enclosed spaces which are hard for mosquitos to escape, which is only a few thousands years old, and evolution usually takes more time.
That makes sense
They didn’t need to.
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.
You 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.
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 going
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?
I definitely had that as vaguely factual, I thought heavy from blood they lightened the load before flying off and the hole was a too tempting target plus they enjoyed the symbolism. I asked ChatGPT and it said it was made up and was quite sneering about it so I suppose that is that.
I didn’t know mosquitoes enjoyed symbolism. Perhaps I can read them some Baudelaire next time
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.
They just seemed to have the correct attitude to do it anyway.
Whatever you read was pure mosquitoshit uwu
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.
