It’s night time. You nuzzle up to your pillow, leaving one ear exposed. Suddenly, disrupting the silence, you hear the kind of music you don’t want to hear! The music of the blood-sucking mosquito. Although we continue to grow in knowledge with the passage of time, do we know enough to say the blood sucking mosquito serves a good and useful purpose? We’ll present more than one example of how the answer is, Yes!
Blood Sucking Mosquito as Food
Most of us realize mosquitoes serve as food for many birds. Ever seen bats, at dusk, circling around dipping and diving? You can be sure that a sizeable number of the “bugs” it is eating are mosquitoes. But we would be mistaken if we imagined that mosquitoes serve as food for birds alone. Many aquatic animals eat mosquito larvae. As important as food is to these creatures, the average person would probably not accept this as a sufficiently ‘good and useful purpose’.
Mosquitoes as Pollinators
All mosquitoes suck blood, right? Well, no, not right! Only female mosquitoes suck blood, and that is only when they are producing eggs. Reflect on that for a moment. If mosquitoes do not need blood to survive, what do they eat? The surprising answer is: nectar from flowers.
Building on that fact, is it not apparent that mosquitoes will thus come into contact with pollen? And that in so doing, mosquitoes will unintentionally carry flower from one flower to the next? Yes, the fact is: mosquitoes are pollinators. We all can attest to the fact that pollination is essential for human existence.
Mosquitoes and Blood
Everyone who is located where mosquitoes live is familiar, not just with the bark of the mosquito, but also with its bite. But there is a silver lining to the blood-sucking cloud. In order to facilitate drinking blood, the mosquito employs anti-coagulants. These chemicals may prove useful to medical science. Truly a curious kind of give and take.
Note: You might also enjoy Blood Sucking Bedbug: A Vector of Disease?
References:
- USDA Forest Service: Aedes communis: The Pollinating Mosquito
- NCBI: J Med Entomol. 1996 Jul;33(4):645-50. Salivary gland anticoagulants in… mosquitoes…
Just wish people were not sensitive to the bite. 😉