Mosquitoes are insects that, with their bites, can give a person many unpleasant minutes. But human blood is not their main food.
The common mosquito is a bloodsucking insect, which is most often found in river valleys or in swampy lowlands, in the forest zone. The average life expectancy depends mainly on the air temperature - it is about 1.5-4 months. Males have a much shorter lifespan than females.
What do mosquitoes eat?
To maintain life, forest mosquitoes feed on sugar-containing liquids, plant sap. To ensure the development of offspring, females also need blood - human or any warm-blooded animals. This blood is also partially used as food. To gain access to the blood vessels she needs, the female pierces the skin with thin bristles that hide inside the proboscis and sucks out the blood. At the same time, its saliva gets into the puncture on the skin, due to which blood clotting is disturbed - insignificantly, of course, only so that the mosquito can drink the amount of blood it needs. But along with this saliva, various unpleasant infections can be transmitted, which cause swelling and itching, and sometimes an allergic reaction.
In a male mosquito, such bristles are very delicate - it is not able to pierce the skin with them, therefore it can only eat flower nectar.
But only adults eat in this way. Like other dipterans, mosquitoes go through four phases in their development: an egg, a larva, a pupa, and an imago. At a time, females can lay about three hundred eggs in the stagnant water of different reservoirs. Soon, larvae hatch from them. They usually swim upside down near the surface of water bodies, feeding on the smallest organisms and various organic particles, until they transform into a pupa. When the development of the mosquito in the pupa comes to an end, a small gap appears in the cocoon, and an adult crawls out of it.
Why no one likes mosquitoes
The common mosquito, like other blood-sucking insects, is capable of giving people a lot of trouble. Mosquito bites are not only quite painful, but can also cause infection with infectious diseases. There are also areas where mosquitoes are found in such a multitude that they can impede grazing of livestock, and also complicate the work of people who work in the field, in the garden, in the vegetable garden.
To find a victim, a mosquito is guided primarily by smell - it is able to catch carbon dioxide that the victim emits when breathing. The lactic acid released from sweat can be smelled several kilometers away, so a sweaty person attracts more insects.
