How does a Mosquito bite?
- When a mosquito bites, she has a problem... think
about it, when you cut yourself and you’re bleeding,
do you just bleed forever? No! Your blood starts to stick
together and you get a scab. That is called clotting, or
more scientifically, coagulation. Coagulation is the
reaction our blood has to air or other things it comes in
contact with. If our blood didn’t coagulate, then
when we got a cut, we’d just keep bleeding... yuck! Really,
blood is a very cool thing. There's a bunch of
information about it here.
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- But for a mosquito, coagulation is a bad thing.
Imagine sipping
blood through your thin, straw-like mouthparts
when all of a sudden, the blood starts to coagulate. Your
straw would get clogged! So a mosquito spits
before she sucks your blood! Yuck, again!
- She spits a chemical called an
"anticoagulant." This keeps your blood from
sticking together and clogging her straw. She also spits
an anesthetic to keep you from feeling her bite. Some of
this stuff - this mosquito spit - stays behind, in you,
and causes the itchy bump. It is actually the result of
an allergy to mosquito spit so some people react to it
more than others.
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- This also explains how a mosquito can spread a disease
like malaria. Malaria
is an animal also. It actually lives part
of its life inside a mosquito. It reproduces
there! So if a female mosquito takes a blood meal from a
person who has malaria, the malria animal goes into her,
reproduces and the new malarias go to her salivary glands
so she can spit them into someone else. Most
scientists agree that AIDS cannot be spread by mosquitoes
because it cannot live in a mosquito. And mosquitoes
don't go from person to person directly. Generally, if a
mosquito is allowed to finish feeding, she will get her
entire blood meal from one host. Then she feels really
fat, so she goes to some quiet place and rests,
processing her blood meal. She cleans herself really well
after her meal and isn’t likely to spread diseases
that way.
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- Mark Berman, 1999
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