Patricia Mena, age 12, of Dallas, Texas, for her question:
Why do mosquitoes bite more in the summer?
In most places, the winter months are too cold for picnics and outdoor camping. They are also too cold for mosquitoes and there are none of them around. But with the first breath of spring, off we go with a bag of sandwiches to enjoy life under the open sky ‑ and what do we find? The sweet warm air is a buzz with enemy insects; waiting to suck our blood and leave us with a rash of itchy bumps. The laws of nature would seem to b e more fair if the mosquitoes buzzed around during the winters and left the summers for us.
The mosquitoes that attack us are winged adults.‑ The winter is too cold for their fragile bodies and also their food supplies are scarce: Mr. Mosquito feeds on plant sap and fruit juices. ,Mrs. Mosquito feeds on blood fresh blood. Plant sap and fruits are scarce in the cold months. Frogs and lizards birds and other blood banks which provide the food for Mrs. Mosquito have either come south to warmer climates or they are fast asleep and safely hidden.
Insects the world over have worked out many ingenious plots to cope with the changing seasons. All of them start life a s eggs and the eggs are usually tough enough to sleep safely through the coldest weather. Many go through a caterpillar and pupa stage and most of the pupas can also withstand the winter. The adult winged phase of life is usually very short and the pupa hatches only when the air is warm enough.
The mosquito spends the first three quarters of its life in the water or under a blanket of frosty snow. We only notice the little pest when it hatches into a winged adult and takes to the air.
Life begins when the mother mosquito lays a. clutch of eggs on a swamp, a lake or a sluggish stream.
The eggs are pale little cones and 50 to 200 of them are sealed together to form a floating raft. The eggs laid in the summer hatch in a few days. Those laid in late fall do not hatch until the water is warmed by the breath of spring.
The youngsters are wriggly, hammer‑headed little grubs. These hungry larvae swim through the water searching for fragments of plant and animal debris. They need air and must come to the surface to breathe. If the surface of their watery home is covered with a fine film of oil they suffocate and perish. That is why we 'spray the pools in mosquito infested areas with oil or insecticides.
In about a week, the grubs rise to the surface and turn into crysalises. There they rest, hanging from the surface of the water. In cracks a few days, the surface/and the long‑legged mosquitoes struggle forth and take to the air. Half of them will be females, armed arid ready td suck our blood. The trick, of course, is to destroy them before they have a chance to grow up.