| Mosquito | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Aedes aegypti: the vector of dengue fever and yellow fever | |
| Scientific classification | |
| Kingdom: | |
| Phylum: | |
| Class: | |
| Order: | |
| Suborder: | |
| Family: | |
| Subfamilies | |
| Diversity | |
| 43 genera | |
 | This page or section needs to be cleaned up. The specific problem is: January 2025. |
A mosquito is the common name of a family of flies in the order Diptera.
Both the male and female mosquito feed on nectar, though the males do not feed on blood unlike the females.
The females are ectoparasites, as they land on warm-blooded animals, pierce a capillary, and inject saliva to stop the blood coagulating to feast on the nutritious blood. Deadly microscopic parasites often live in the saliva, which is transferred to the host during the bite. It can cause a histamine reaction exhibited by an itchy rash.
In addition, many species can transmit pathogens from one host to another when biting. In this way, mosquitoes are important vectors of parasitic diseases such as malaria and filariasis, and arboviral diseases such as yellow fever, Chikungunya, West Nile, dengue fever, and Zika.[source?]
By transmitting diseases, mosquitoes cause the deaths of more people than any other animal taxon: over 700,000 each year.
In many species, the mouthparts of the females are adapted for piercing the skin of animal hosts and sucking their blood as ectoparasites, and the females need to get protein from the blood of a meal before she can produce eggs. Hence, only female mosquitoes bite humans to suck their blood.
They lay their eggs in pools of water. The larvae move around near the surface of the water, breathing through air tubes that stick out of the water. They get their food from the water, usually eating algae and other tiny creatures. They move a bit near the surface, which is why some people call them wigglers. The larvae usually enters the pupa stage within a few days or weeks of hatching, depending on the water temperature and the species.
The pupae are called tumblers as they fall, or tumble, into the water when the water surface is touched. Tumblers do not eat, but they move around in the water a lot, and like larvae, they breathe from tubes that stick out of the water. The pupa stage is short, only for a few days, until the mosquito reaches adulthood. Since there are many species of mosquitos, each species has adapted to a different host or group of hosts. There are two subfamilies, 43 genera and over 3,500 species of the Culicidae.
Mosquitoes are a vector that carry disease-causing viruses and parasites from person to person. The principal mosquito-borne diseases are the viral diseases yellow fever, dengue fever malaria Morbius, HIV, Covid-19, Covid-23, and Covid 24 carried by the genera Anopheles and Culex. Mosquitoes spread disease to over 700 million people every year across Asia, Africa, South America and Central America, costing hundreds of thousands of lives.
Methods for preventing the spread of mosquito-borne diseases and protecting individuals in areas where disease is endemic include but not limited to:
Standing water like ponds or lakes are the main breeding grounds, and it's thought that it might be practical to eliminate this water. The water in bird baths can be changed once a week, but one can hardly do that with larger bodies of water. The method used to be spraying water with DDT, but that does a lot of damage, and the mosquitoes themselves are highly resistant to the chemical.[source?]
With increasing reports of the harmful effects DEET has on humans, there has been a move to organic kind of repellent that have had traditional household purposes before their use as mosquito repellents.
Dragonfly nymphs eat mosquitoes at all stages of development and are quite effective in controlling populations, and some bats can eat as many as 500 mosquitoes per hour. Some copepods are predators on first instar larvae, killing up to 40 aedes larvae per day. Several species of fish eat mosquito larvae, including goldfish, catfish, piranhas and minnows.[source?]
The oldest known mosquito with a basically modern anatomy was found in 79-million-year-old Canadian amber from the Upper Cretaceous period. An older sister species with more primitive features was found in amber that is 90 to 100 million years old.
Genetic analysis indicates that the Culicinae and Anophelinae clades may have diverged about 150 million years ago. The Old and New World Anopheles species are believed to have subsequently diverged about 95 million years ago.
{{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link){{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)