60 bites per minute: mosquitoes become overly aggressive

in the Summer you should use mosquito repellent. After finding themselves in a forest near Moscow, you can get up to 60 bites in just one minute. This year in the capital region — an unprecedented invasion of blood-sucking. Swarms arrange a real hunt on people in parks, forests and cottages. Attack in packs and show unprecedented bloodlust. The reason for such aggressiveness and when mosquito activity starts to decline?

This is not the Egyptian penalty, but an unprecedented natural anomaly. The consequences of the invasion of the hordes of blood-sucking had time to test what is called in their own skin everything from fishermen and tourists to tourists in city parks. Two year old son of Kristina Kiseleva bitten from head to toe right on the Playground.

“Bitten very much, this we have never been! Terrible allergies, smear almost a week, gradually passes, but every day after our walks it’s like a lot of bites,” says Christina.

Rumors that the mosquitoes missed the person due to isolation, denied entomologists. Winged bloodsuckers bred in countless numbers because of the rain the combination of heavy rains and warm weather.

“Each female can lay several hundred eggs, and then the rain went. And here they are, dear, your these rafts, made of eggs, in each of our stagnant puddle, stagnant ditch, put. In a barrel in the basement,” explains entomologist Oleg Tkachev.

“the mosquitoes we are used to it, but what is happening this year, it’s really a disaster for us! In their plots we have to go in private clothes, because biting mercilessly” — the Chairman of gardening Association “For a healthy life” Elena Vasilyeva.

a Shocking discovery: the people themselves are bred mosquitoes! And literally every dacha.

“Yes, they love to use barrels that our gardeners like to use to collect rainwater there predators do not have, and does not dry out the barrel. Well, actually, the ideal conditions,” explains entomologist, researcher of the Zoological Museum of Lomonosov Moscow state University Nikita Vikhrev.

Bitten and combed members SNT “For healthy life” show wetlands on the river Klyazma. She became so due to private dams.

the Behavior of fish that eats insect larvae, confirms that the vast incubator for millions of mosquitoes.

Well here it is, the mosquito squeak, he’s ordinary mosquito, in Latin Culex pipiens. There is a perception that if you give a female pipiens plenty drunk, she quietly flies away and the bite will not itch. This is not so. Barely sticking to you with their proboscis, then inject pipiens irritants.

the Whole history of mankind — just a brief moment in the life of mosquitoes, which appeared on Earth 250 million years ago, at the beginning of the Mesozoic. And to wit, they won’t refuse — not so long ago they learned to attack the man in silence, without the whine of a mosquito.

“Because the game, which he is forced to hunt, that is, the person, very intelligent, very nervous, the winners are those Culex pipiens, which are reduced to gualta for this flight they have become somewhat “drunk”, but very quiet and night, we hear them fly up to us. Can we say that the mosquito is at the top of the food chain, because the rest of it — food? The mosquito adult in fact, Yes,” said the entomologist Nikita Vikhrev.

But from the point of view of entomologists, mosquito is not bothersome and nasty parasite, and beautiful and just incredible in the perfection of creation of nature. Which is only awesome and solemn picture of the transformation of a larva into an adult.

“Well, perhaps it is the most amazing thing — this device is its proboscis, which consists of seven stilettos, each of which performs its function. One pierces, the other injects something against coagulation blood, the third is the blood in the mosquito,” continues his explanation entomologist Nikita Vikhrev.

And finally the most amazing fact of life bloodsuckers. Scientists, no matter how I try, I can’t accurately count their number on the planet, ranging between 200-300 billion. Insects are the basis of many ecological communities, that is the main and sometimes the only food for hundreds of species of birds, amphibians, reptiles and fishes.

“And in this sense, I would not put experiments on the destruction of mosquitoes. You know, tomorrow will destroy the mosquitoes, and the next day will disappear starlings. You need it?” — asks the vortices.

According to forecasts of entomologists, the peak mosquito activity, which is in the Metropolitan area shifted due to the weather for almost a month, should be completed by mid-July. And yet there remains only to stock up on insect repellent and patience.

Text: “to Conduct-Moscow”