S3E4: Masterful Mosquitos

In this episode Amanda Bunten-Walberg gives details into the diversity of mosquito worlds, meals, and physiologies. She focuses on mosquitos who rely on blood to live, unpacking some of the strategies and tactics they use to secure a meal. This content was originally aired in Season 5 of The Animal Turn Podcast.

 Featured: 

• Epidemiological Dividual with Christs Lynteris on The Animal Turn.
• Superfly: The Unexpected Lives of the World’s Most Successful Insectsby Jonthan Balcombe 
• Mosquitoby Richard Jones. 
• Mosquitos sound clips from Free Sound (662969) and Pixabay (105770)

Credits:

• Claudia Hirtenfelder, producer and host 
• Amanda Bunten-Walberg, co-host
• Christiaan Mentz, sound editor and producer 
• Rebecca Shen, content producer and designer (logo and episode artwork)
• Gordon Clarke, bed music composer
• Learn more about the team here. 

Support the podcast via: 

• Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/join/TheAnimalTurn 
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Sponsor:

Thank you to the sponsors of the fifth season of The Animal Turn podcast, “Animals and Biosecurity,” where this animal highlight was originally aired 29 September 2022. They are: 

A.P.P.L.E
Animals in Politics, Law, and Ethics researches how we live in interspecies societies and polities.

Biosecurities Research Collective
The Biosecurities and Urban Governance Research brings together scholars interested in biosecurity.

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Chapters

• 0:00 Introduction
• 2:08 Mosquito Diversity
• 5:40 Mosquitos who bite
• 11:38 Credits
• 12:03 Epidemiological Dividual

Transcript

00:00 - Introduction 

• Welcome to Season 3 of The Animal Highlight, extracted from Season 5 of The Animal Turn Podcast (focused on Animals and Biosecurity). 
• We are focused on the animals that are caught up in biosecurity dramas. 
• My co-host this season is Amanda Bunten-Walberg who at the time of the recording was a PhD candidate at Queen’s University interested in questions related more-than-human ethics especially in contagion contexts, using bats and COVID19 as her focus.  
• Animals in Philosophy, Politics, Law, and Ethics (A.P.P.L.E) and the Biosecurities and Urban Governance Research Collective sponsored the season of The Animal Turn where this content was extracted from. 
• This season had several technical and sound issues.
• This episode considers mosquitos. 

02:08 – Mosquito Diversity 

• Superfly: The Unexpected Lives of the World’s Most Successful Insectsby Jonthan Balcombe 
• Mosquitoby Richard Jones. 
• Mosquitos are at the center of some of the world’s most pressing biosecurity concerns.  
• The 2021 Centre for Disease Control’s World Mosquito Day campaign boldly claimed that “Mosquitos cause more death and disease than any other animal on the planet.” 
• According to the World Health Organization’s World Malaria Report, an estimated 627 000 people died of malaria in 2020.  These numbers simply can’t capture the gravity and depth of loss, and I don’t want to erase or minimize the enormous suffering that comes from these illnesses.  I do, however, want to take a closer look at these beings who are blamed for so much death and disease and who are almost universally hated.
• When many of us think of mosquitos, we have a vague idea of them as an undifferentiable mass of biting pests.  
• But there is actually incredible diversity among mosquitos.  There are over 3500 species of mosquitos in the world and these mosquito species have different preferences for feeding, breeding, flying heights, geographic location, roosting behaviours, and biting practices (Jones, 22, 47).  

05:40 – Mosquitos who bite 

• The mosquitos who humans encounter when we get bitten, are only a small fraction of the world’s mosquitos.  Most adult mosquitos actually get energy for their daily activities by consuming plant nectar (Jones, 30-31).
• It is only certain species of adult female mosquitoes who need to consume protein-rich blood at a specific life stage to enable the growth and maturation of their eggs (Jones, 30-31).  
• Mosquitos have incredible senses of smell and chemical detection. 
•  Those who bite humans can actually sense and hunt the pulses of CO2 that humans exhale and differentiate these from continuous concentrations or emissions of CO2 (Jones, 43).  They can also smell specific chemical components of our body odour (Jones, 45).  
• Once they have closed in on their desired human target, who is roughly 100 million times bigger than them, they often must maneuver around moving or swatting limbs (Jones, 35).  
• A study done on the Aedes aegypti mosquito found that they remember the experience of swats and near misses, along with the associated scent, and they make decisions to move to safer locations and targets (Balcombe, 104).  So, in addition to hunting and scent tracking, they are also evading, remembering, and minimizing risks.
• Mosquitos have two sleek wings, which can beat at roughly 400-600 beats per second (Jones, 53).  This is incredible, especially if you compare that with hummingbirds who flap at 90 beats per second (Jones, 53).  Their wings allow them to make nuanced maneuvers and their impact absorbing legs mean that they are capable of doing gentle landing hovers and light tough downs, so that they can land, undetected (Jones, 52).  
• Now comes the bite.  The female mosquito’s beak is mainly a sheath that protects the inner lance that does the penetrating.  The lance actually consists of six interlocking blades, four of which are saw-toothed at the tip (Jones, 34).   One of the blades has a tube running down it, for injecting lubricating saliva that has anticoagulant properties (Jones, 34, 36).  And this saliva is what causes our bodies to react with an inflamed and itchy bump (Jones, 41).  And then there is their straw-like tongue at the centre of it all, through which they can suck up blood.  This typically takes place in 2 ½ to 3 minutes (Jones, 36).  In this time, mosquitos drink a fraction of a drop of blood, or 1-5 thousandths of a mL (Jones, 39).  

12:03 – Epidemiological Dividual 

• Christos epidemiological dividual 
• Much like rats mosquitoes have been blamed for  lot of disease, and not without reason. 
• We are part of ecological and environments that we can sometime struggle to understand. 
• See work by Neel Ahuja. 

11:38 - Credits

• Thank you to Animals in Philosophy, Politics, Law, and Ethics (A.P.P.L.E) for sponsoring the podcast and the Biosecurities and Urban Governance Research Collective for sponsoring the season of The Animal Turn where this content was extracted from. 
• A big thank you to Amanda Bunten-Walberg for co-hosting this season of The Animal Highlight
• This episode was produced by Claudia Hirtenfelder and edited by Christiaan Mentz. 
• The logo and episode artwork were created by Rebecca Shen. 
• Show notes compiled by Claudia Hirtenfelder
• Please rate and review wherever you listen. 
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