OMG Facts About Mosquitoes
- May 15, 2024
- 4 mins, 15 secs read
AKA why Bzigo prioritizes indoor mosquito detection
Sure, every animal has a vital place in this world. But this doesn’t mean we should welcome all of them – especially mosquitoes – in our own homes. Quite the opposite, we must actively prevent them from getting close to us, since apart from being annoying, they are also responsible for a long line of diseases and deaths.
Did you know that despite all the post-bite sprays, creams and other interventions, prevention remains the most effective protection against mosquitoes, especially for children, pets, people with compromised immune systems, and all those living in tropical zones.
Mosquitoes might be small. But their impact on ecosystems and even the history of humanity has been mighty. From prehistoric times to the present day, these tiny insects have shaped everything from the way we live to the extinction of other animals. Are you ready to explore the unexpected?
Long, long ancestry with a deadly impact
Mosquitoes have been around for some 80 million years! Even more shocking, the oldest mosquito found filled with blood is an astounding 46 million years old. You read that right! Plus, scientists theorize that mosquitoes’ carrying malaria could have played a role in the extinction of dinosaurs around 65 million years ago.
Current-day facts are just as worrying. Of the approximately 3,000 mosquito species, around 200 are known to transmit diseases. The most dangerous are Culex, Anopheles, and Aedes. These mosquitoes are responsible for spreading deadly diseases like West Nile Virus, Malaria, Dengue fever, Chikungunya, Zika, Yellow Fever, and Mayaro.
⚠️☠️ Every year, mosquito-borne diseases claim the lives of over 700,000 people across the world. This is way more than the number of people other people kill: 400,000! Quite unbelievable. And when it comes to the total number of bites across the world, we don’t even know how many. In the billions.
A serial killer deserving a TV series – a potentially more popular protagonist than Freddy Krueger
While both the male and the female mosquitoes feed on nectar and plant juices, female mosquitoes also bite us and other creatures – mammals, birds, fish, reptiles, and amphibians. For her, we are a great source of the nutrients she needs to make many, many baby mosquitoes.
Her Freddy Kruger-style knife is her needle. Known as the proboscis, it consists of six separate needles that actually cut our skin open to penetrate it, and then dig in to find the perfect point to take blood from.
Sometimes she is not very precise about this process. She needs to make a little mess inside of us until it finds a proper place to suck our blood from. Yet, she is such an expert in what she is doing that she injects us with her saliva – it comes with an anticoagulant to stop our blood from clotting and make it easier for her to gulp it down. She even injects some anaesthetic to calm us down…so we won’t feel anything until it’s too late.
Despite all her efforts to get away with biting, for some of us, her saliva’s proteins cause allergic reactions and even severe immune responses.
Cruel drama queens, Ravenous eaters, Notorious breeders
Mosquitoes constantly create that annoying buzz we hear, a result of their rapid wing movements fluttering at about an unbelievable 1,000 times per second. This creates that distinctive sound that not only annoys us but also often signals an impending bite.
Female mosquitoes are so greedy that after sucking blood from a single meal, they can triple their weight. This is how much they feed on their hosts – whether it’s us or other species.
Female mosquitoes take hunting seriously. To attain the blood with which they will use to create their babies, they employ vision, heat sensors, and chemoreception, all to locate their hosts – whether it’s us humans or animals.
They see us, they sense our body heat, and they smell our “perfume,” mainly the carbon dioxide that we exhale. To avoid them we would have to not move, not exercise, and not even breathe! Of course we fail. So, they bite us and with all the nutrition in our blood, they lay around 50-200 eggs at a time.
They are developing pesticide resistance!
There is no greater danger than underestimating your opponent, said Lao Tzu, which couldn’t be truer in the case of mosquitoes. Remember how they kill more humans than humans themselves? And now, on top of that, we’re finding out that they can develop resistance to insecticides, and even pass this resistance on to their offspring. This transgenerational adaptability poses a big challenge in controlling the spread of mosquito-borne diseases.
Here enters Bzigo!
Thanks to advanced technology that does not use chemicals or other hazardous substances, the artificial intelligence-powered Bzigo Iris device identifies each mosquito that enters your indoor space. It uses an eye-safe laser beam to show you its location while alerting you through the device itself or through the app. This tech-enabled mosquito elimination method gets rid of mosquitoes and prevents bites – remember, prevention is the best method of protection against these persistent creatures!
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