Or is it that the victims pest warning system is currently winning the biological arms race, in which case how are mosquitoes able to successfully reproduce? Or is it that mosquitoes have evolved such that their spawning numbers offset the difficulty they have biting?
Biology is hard.
They do a really shitty job of ‘not irritating’ your skin. They get it right half the time. The only biological success they’ve had in evolution is that they are so freaking numerous. Ask a northern Ontarian Indigenous person who grew up in rocky swamps … you haven’t seen mosquitoes until you’ve breathed in clouds of them.
That sounds awful. How do you guys manage? Just stay indoors?
I gave up on anything but DEET years ago. If they’re real bad though even that sometimes isn’t enough. That’s face net and baggy full body clothing time.
Baby, you got
a stewburgers goingYou speak truth.
Hello from the hell-swamps of Louisiana, where it’s Summer for 8-10 months a year and the mosquitos are an omnipresent scourge.
Bonus swarm: termite flights so densely packed that they show up as “weather” on radar.
Our summers up here are at their peak in June and July and on hot still windless evenings if you are caught out in the wild, it’s torturous. I can’t imagine what it would be like down there with a longer hot season. There’s a city near here called North Bay where every July the city on the shores of a large lake gets infested with swarms of shad flies, harmless bugs but so thick and numerous that the place ends up smelling like a giant tin of tuna.