Mosquito Lullaby

by Madeline Bodin

You can hear the whine from across the room, higher in pitch and more ceaseless than the whine of a toddler, and even more annoying. If it has roused you from half-sleep, you have two choices: snap on the light and try to find its source before it finds you, or drift back to sleep hoping it finds someone else first.

It may wake you again later – a droning, right in your ear this time. I haven’t seen any scientific studies on this, but I’m willing to bet that mosquitoes are the cause of at least 97 percent of all the self-inflicted smacks to the ear. After you’ve smacked yourself in the ear and heard the droning suddenly stop, you’ll drop back to sleep. But why was that mosquito out to get you? How did it find you in the dark? And does a mosquito have any purpose other than disturbing the sleep of humans?

You could say that stalker mosquito was driven by maternal instinct. After mating, a female mosquito goes off in search of a blood meal. It’s not you she’s after, but the protein in your blood, which she needs to produce her eggs. Female mosquitoes don’t just get their blood meals from humans. They’ll sip a blood meal from other animals too.

Male mosquitoes don’t bite at all. They spend their short, and presumably happy, lives mating and sipping plant nectar.

A female mosquito can track you down across the bedroom or across the backyard by following the tell-tale trail of carbon dioxide from your exhaled breath. They also use body heat, lactic acid and fatty acids to zoom in on you, or any creature which might provide a blood meal.

We would probably have no complaints about mosquitoes if they just quietly sipped a bit of blood and left nothing behind. But they do leave something behind: the saliva they injected into your blood to prevent it from clotting before they drank their fill. It’s the saliva that causes the itchy, red bump and it’s the saliva that transmits the germs that cause malaria and yellow fever in warmer places, and encephalitis and perhaps even West Nile disease in our area.

There are about 39 species of mosquito in Vermont, and about 45 in New Hampshire. Most of those species are found in both states, says Alan Eaton, a specialist in entomology with the University of New Hampshire Cooperative Extension. The most vexing mosquitoes in our area are flood water mosquitoes. You can think of them as country mosquitoes, as compared to their “city” cousins that thrive around human development (including farms) and are more likely to spread disease.

The eggs of flood water mosquitoes are laid on the damp edges of bodies of water, including vernal pools, lakes, ponds, rivers, swamps and just plain wet spots. When rising water from spring rains or a summer thunderstorm floods the location where the mosquito eggs lie waiting, the eggs begin to develop into their aquatic larval and pupal stages, bursting into the air as a whining, mating, blood-thirsty mass a short time later. Many flood water mosquitoes reproduce just once a year, but some will produce a new generation whenever the water reaches a certain level.

Some of these mosquitoes live in the Connecticut River and its tributaries, says Eaton, but you won’t find them in the main channel. Mosquito larva need calm water, and since they are a favorite food of many fish, you are more likely to find them where fish are not. River mosquitoes are found in eddies, swamps and muddy places at the river’s edge.

Might that itchy, red bump be easier to take if you knew where your little blood donation stood in the big circle of life? Maybe. Mosquitoes don’t pollinate any plants and they are not the exclusive diet of any animal in our neck of the woods. They do make up a sizeable part of the diets of several species of other insects, frogs, toads, fish and bats as well as swallows and bluebirds. But some of those animals we’ve only learned to love because they eat mosquitoes.

After pointing out that mosquitoes are very much part of that famous circle of life, moving nutrients along by filtering bacteria out of puddles as larva, then being eaten by much larger animals as adults, Eaton suggests that it is not the mosquito’s insignificant role in the web of life we object to, but our own role.

“I don’t like it when my blood is taken by a mosquito and then that mosquito is eaten by a bird,” he says. “I would rather feed the bird something else.”

Of course. No matter how small our sacrifice or how grand the big picture, we would much rather eat than be eaten. It’s a desire so strong that it might even get you out of a comfortable bed to swat the source of that buzzing whine before it gets any closer.

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When not providing a blood meal for the many mosquitoes of Andover, Vt., Madeline Bodin writes about the natural sciences for local, regional and national publications.

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