Every other Friday, the Outside/In team answers a listener question about the natural world. Recently we put out a prompt on social media for questions about bugs, and we got a lot of questions about mosquitoes.
So to answer them all, Outside/In host Nate Hegyi spoke to Lyric Bartholomay, a professor in the pathobiological sciences department at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Submit your question about the natural world to the Outside/In team. You can record it as a voice memo on your smartphone and send it to outsidein@nhpr.org or leave a voicemail on our hotline, 1-844-GO-OTTER. We also accept questions sent to Twitter or Instagram. We’re @OutsideInRadio in both places.
This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Nate Hegyi: The question I’m dying to know the answer to is from our listener Mackenzie, who asked us on Instagram, “Why do mosquitoes always bite me before anyone else?”
Lyric Bartholomay: So what we know about mosquitoes and their attraction to people is mostly from research that's done on mosquitoes that transmit malaria parasites to people in Africa and mosquitoes that transmit Zika virus to us in the United States.
So there's a study that shows that the mosquito that transmits malaria is more attracted to people after they've had beer, and to people who have recently eaten bananas.
We know from another set of studies that the mosquito, Aedes aegypti that transmits Zika virus, for example, that mosquito was shown in one study to prefer people who had blood type O. But the same species in a different study was shown to like people who have blood type B. So there's conflicting results even within one mosquito species. Just imagine how complicated that gets when you start to look at 3,600 different species?
Nate Hegyi: This next question is from @elton_appreciates on Instagram, and I’m going to paraphrase this question, but how does bug blood work?
Lyric Bartholomay: Blood in bugs is really bathing all of their organs. It's not neatly captured in veins and arteries like our blood is. But the cells in bug blood are also there for an immune response, just like you and me. You know, you get a scrape on your skin and suddenly you've been exposed to all kinds of things. Your blood and your cells would come to that place and clot up the scratch, right? And you'd get a scab. The same thing actually happens in a mosquito. So if I poke through the so called skin of a mosquito, I actually can see a scab form in very short order.
Nate Hegyi: So here’s another big picture question, it’s from Matt, also on Instagram. He asked, “Are bug sprays and mosquito yard sprays toxic to other non-nuisance bugs and pollinators?”
Lyric Bartholomay: So sprays that you could buy at a big box store, or if you hired somebody to come and spray your backyard, you will also kill all of the pollinators that might come in contact with the leaves that have been covered in that spray.
I also think it's really important to understand that there are agencies around the United States that are involved in controlling mosquitoes, and the sprays that are used in that context are actually a little bit different. If they're spraying to control mosquito larvae, those sprays are really environmentally pretty friendly and remarkably good at killing mosquitoes.
Nate Hegyi: So, this next and final question is from Emma, and she asked us on Instagram, “Are mosquitoes good for anything?”
Lyric Bartholomay: I would say like, well, are people good for anything? There are absolutely ecosystem services, as we would call them. There are some mosquitoes, for example, that are important for orchid pollination in the Pacific Northwest.
We also know that there was a good study that was done in France that showed in a park setting where mosquito larvae were controlled really, really well, there were far fewer mosquitoes for birds to feed on, and then the birds had fewer chicks. And so it wasn't that the mosquito control was toxic directly to the birds. It's just the birds didn't have the same kind of nutrition. And so they were producing fewer fledglings.
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