Female Mosquito Feeding Habits

Female mosquitoes are quite different from the male in the feeding process. Females feed on plant nectar for energy same as males, but that is where the similarity stops. Female mosquitoes also feed on blood. A female mosquito can drink up to four times her body weight in blood in one feeding.

The female must feed on a diet of high protein for reproduction. This protein is normally found in the blood of its victim. The blood meal, (additional protein) is used in the egg production process. Female mosquitoes may either be" specialist," feeding only on birds, mammals, reptiles or amphibians; or" generalists" that will readily attack whatever comes along. Others feed primarily on birds in the spring and then switch to mammals later in the season. Some female mosquitoes will actively bite only at night, while others will readily feed during the day or at night.

Initially, mosquitoes use odor and chemical cues to locate their food sources. As the mosquito nears a potential host, moist air from the host and visual cues become important. The chemical cues help the mosquito decide whether to land on the host. Carbon dioxide exhaled by animals, including humans, is an example of a chemical cues of mosquitoes use to find their hosts.

The finely toothed maxillae (hypodermic needle) of the fascicle begins sawing into the tissue of the skin find back and forth movements. The fascicle is "a bundle of muscle tendon fibers." The fascicle is guided into the skin between the labella. As it goes into the skin the labium folds back like a hairpin and the mosquito shifts its legs closer to the body. When about half of the length of the fascicle has been inserted into the skin, the mosquito begins to draw blood. After the mosquito's abdomen is filled, she straightens her legs to withdraw the fascicle. The fascicle springs upward and forward out of the wound back into the deep groove in the labium. The feeding has completed, and you given blood.

I read this, very interesting.

A poem by Dick Edmonds;

Although I travel incognito, I can't deceive the smart mosquito, while others also have corpuscles, Mine are the ones toward which she hustles; my blood is thin and I have asthma, she doesn't care, she wants my plasma. Mosquitoes seem to love the rind of the me, the front, the sides, and the behind of me; I've tried to think why they are so smitten, and as I think, once more I'm bitten.