Fun Facts about The Flying Vampires
Inspired by articles on NatGeo, Gates Notes and the resilience of The Flying Vampires, I created this infotoon with Comicgen & Powerpoint -
Mosquitoes are the deadliest animals in the world, humans come second
Of the 3,500 species that researchers have identified so far, only a few hundred feed on human blood, including the Zika-carrying Aedes aegypti and Aedes albopictus.
In the mosquito world, males live off plants. The female is the biter, the worker, the source of human peril; she lives off plants too, but all those blood nutrients are for her eggs, the nourishing and laying of which are the great project of her short, purposeful, and somewhat solitary life. A single mating may be all an Ae. aegypti needs; she stores sperm inside her body, fertilizing separate batches of eggs as needed, up to several hundred at a time. Five or six occasions of egg laying are common for an Ae. aegypti that escapes extermination by swat or insecticide and reaches her expected month-long life span.
Aedes became the primary carrier of the Zika virus, for example, and Anopheles the carrier of malaria parasites. It’s the pathogens, those disease-causing organisms driven to multiply in mammalian bodies, that over millennia “learned,” evolutionarily speaking, what excellent transport and delivery services some mosquitoes happen to provide.
Click image for enlarged view. Mosquito silhouette image courtesy of Elias Schäfer, Pixabay
Mosquitoes are the deadliest animals in the world, humans come second
Image courtesy of Gates Notes
Of the 3,500 species that researchers have identified so far, only a few hundred feed on human blood, including the Zika-carrying Aedes aegypti and Aedes albopictus.
In the mosquito world, males live off plants. The female is the biter, the worker, the source of human peril; she lives off plants too, but all those blood nutrients are for her eggs, the nourishing and laying of which are the great project of her short, purposeful, and somewhat solitary life. A single mating may be all an Ae. aegypti needs; she stores sperm inside her body, fertilizing separate batches of eggs as needed, up to several hundred at a time. Five or six occasions of egg laying are common for an Ae. aegypti that escapes extermination by swat or insecticide and reaches her expected month-long life span.
Aedes became the primary carrier of the Zika virus, for example, and Anopheles the carrier of malaria parasites. It’s the pathogens, those disease-causing organisms driven to multiply in mammalian bodies, that over millennia “learned,” evolutionarily speaking, what excellent transport and delivery services some mosquitoes happen to provide.
Comments
Post a Comment