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.
they have. mostly you don’t feel the bites until afterwards
The real question is at the evolutionary level which is, what the fuck do the little assholes get out of making their bite a slight irritation?
A tick can bury its head in the tip of dick, spend days sucking so much blood it’s an engorged blimp. Assuming I am blind and my arms are too short to reach my dick, the thing could be there for years and I would have no fucking clue it was there unless I got lime disease or someone else sees it.
Hyperbolic scenario with the whole dick tip thing but I have gotten back from hunting. Saw what looked like a scratch on my neck line, thought it was weird cuz I didn’t remember any prickers scratching me. Fast forward 3 days and I look in the mirror and see what looks like a skin tag. I’m like what the fuck, grab tweezers and rip it off to learn it was a fuckin tick sucking on my jugular for days. They are like the opposite of the mosquito, the tick releases a numbing agent or something so you don’t even feel the bite or the tick the whole time its on you.
Tldr: mosquitoes r dum 4 itching. Ticks r pros at stealth biting.
From what I know, when a mosquito stings you, it injects some stuff that prevents the area from hurting, probably so that you wouldn’t notice it, but the said stuff also makes the stings super itchy. I’m not completely sure about this though.
Right, you don’t feel the bite. They fly away, and then you start to itch. Most of the time they’re done and give before you notice
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.
I am the same, blood brother. ✊
Hell yeah ✊
Vitamin B-2 in high doses is your friend! You literally cannot overdose on the stuff, and you’ll start sweating it out. You’ll know it is working when your skin smells faintly like the B-12 tablets. At that point all the mosquitos, ticks, fleas, and chiggers can smell is the riboflavin seeping out your pores. Since the biting insects can’t smell your blood, they don’t bite! They will still crawl on you, so check each other for ticks, fleas, etc. when you come out of tall grass/ wooded areas.
I take a multivitamin with B-12 (folate) that also has riboflavin (B-2) in them. I also eat fortified cereal (has a bunch of folate in it too btw) with fortified soy milk since I’ve always had anemia and need all the vitamins I can get. My doctor has looked over my levels before and said it was all normal but I can look into it again. Thanks for the tip.
B-2 then not B-12. You want riboflavin. I always mix those two up.
O blood eh?
It’s not O. I keep forgetting which one I am but I know it is not O.
I have type -O and have never experienced the itching the previous commenter indicated. I also rarely get bitten, thanks to vitamin B-2
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
Shove 500-1000 mg of vitamin B-2 down the kids throat every day. In less than a week, they’ll stop getting bitten at all.
I’ve noticed that too. When out with friends, some people get bitten more than their fair share.
It’s genetics. We produce some oil or something that mosquitos smell. And some people produce more then others.
Basically bad luck.
I have hypohidrosis, so that might affect it?
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.
A is their second favourite after O, IIRC.
Yep my mum is AB+ and she is the magnet if I’m not on holiday with them :)
I’m so delicious I manage to protect the full villa.
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
I didn’t give consent to be penetrated by those appendages.
mosquito bites are epic
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”.
The fact that people often notice and whack mosquitos when they bite suggests that there is still a reproductive advantage to be had
But the question is: how would a mosquito that develops this trait have an easier time reproducing? Assuming it reproduced and had quite a few offspring, would that collective group of thousands of mosquitoes have an easier time reproducing? It wouldn’t, because humans don’t have some kind of vision that tells them the mosquito won’t make them start itching 5 minutes later or whatever, by which point the mosquito is long gone. Even if they did, they’d still smack it upon noticing it, because it carries deadly diseases and is an annoying insect.
It’s like you failed to read the first 2/3 of my reply.
The fact that many people are able to notice and whack many mosquitoes when they bite shows that it isn’t only after 5 minutes that people notice, leaving room for an evolutionary improvement that would allow them to live longer and thus reproduce more
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
Most mosquito bites I get I don’t find out about until hours later.
They didn’t need to.
