Totally Trivia Sample

Let’s Slap at Mosquitoes

c. 2004 J. Spencer

The First Fact
Diana Moran, star of a British fitness show, was hired to demonstrate the effectiveness of a new insect repellant. She was to cover herself in the product, then climb into a glass tank containing 3,000 hungry mosquitoes. Unfortunately, the mosquitoes escaped and attacked everyone in the audience, leaving only the model unbitten.

Quote
Mosquito: Designed by God to make us think better of flies.

Worldwide Scourge
"Mosca" is Spanish for fly, and "ito" means small: mosquito. They live at altitudes up to 8,000 feet in the Himalayas and below sea level in California’s Death Valley. They live in the tropical jungle and they live on the arctic tundra. Approximately ten trillion mosquitoes invade the U.S. every summer. That's about 41,000 mosquitoes per person. At certain places in the Canadian Arctic, huge swarms of mosquitoes can bite an unprotected human up to 9,000 times per minute. A person in this situation could lose half their blood volume in two hours. Mosquitoes even draw blood from freshly dead animals. Scientists estimate there are around 2500 different species of mosquito, although only 130 live in North America. Of those, only two kinds regularly snack on a human beings-- and it is only the females who bite.

Wings
The female's antennae are long and thread-like, whereas the male's are bushy like tiny feathers. The female uses her antennae for tracking the source of carbon dioxide and attractive odors. A mosquito’s wings beat around 600 times per second, and the male uses his fuzzy antennae to home in on the whining sound of the female’s wingbeat which is different from the sound of a male’s wingbeat. (Unless, of course, the male has only recently hatched and his flying isn’t quite up to snuff, in which case it sounds exactly like a female.) The sound also differs from species to species and the male of one species generally ignores females of another species. Male mosquitoes will even be attracted to a tuning fork that vibrates at the same frequency of the humming of a female's wings.

Fast Fact
A power station built in Canada malfunctioned over and over until engineers investigated and found that the equipment was being jammed by thousands of male mosquitoes who were attracted to the whining sound of the machinery which perfectly imitated the sound of a female mosquito.

Food
Most mosquitoes feed on nectar, fruit juices, or honeydew excreted by aphids and other insects. One kind lands on ants and thrusts its beak down the ant's gullet to rob it of semi-digested food. In Steven Speilberg’s film Jurassic Park scientists discover a giant ancient mosquito of the species Toxorynchites trapped in amber. Finding that the mosquito fed on a dinosaur before becoming trapped, they use DNA from the dinosaur blood to reconstruct new dinosaurs. However, the Toxorynchites was one breed of mosquito that never fed on blood, only plant juices. Its mouth parts weren’t set up for piercing skin and sucking blood.

Tools
Pregnant female mosquitoes need a meal of blood to get protein they need to lay their eggs. The female mates only once, storing sperm in her body to be dispensed as it is needed for the rest of her life. If you look closely at a female mosquito, you will see only one thin needle-like proboscis. However, there are four different tools inside this sheath. Two of them act like electric carving knives, with serrated edges that slice up and down to drill a hole in the donor’s skin. One acts like a hose, injecting saliva which thins the blood, prevents it from clotting, and makes it easier to suck. The fourth tool acts as a straw or syringe, drawing the blood from the capillary into the mosquito’s body. In 90 seconds of sucking, she can take in more than her weight in blood, supplying enough protein to enable her to lay several hundred eggs. After she’s done laying her eggs, she immediately begins to look for another blood meal so she can lay more. If she escapes predators and other disasters, she can lay eggs some 20 times before dying. Fortunately, only about one out of every 200 female mosquitoes lives long enough to reproduce.

Fast Fact
Mosquitoes will travel up to six miles to feed, a fact discovered by scientists in the Netherlands who placed pig pens - with the pigs being mosquito bait - farther and farther away from the nearest mosquito habitat in order to see how far they would go. Six miles is a long way for a bug whose top speed is three m.p.h.

Fast Facts
A female mosquito can detect a human being from a distance of 40 yards even in complete darkness. Mosquitoes are better able to sense their prey in humid environments. The sensing receptors on the end of their antennae don’t work as well in dry air.

Avoiding Mosquitoes
According to Wayne Rowley, professor of entomology at Iowa State University, mosquitoes prefer women over men, probably because only female mosquitoes go for blood. Mosquitoes use carbon dioxide detectors to home in on their next meal, and they also find the smell of estrogen and sweat to be especially appealing. They are also attracted to dark colored clothing, such as jeans, and are partial to the color blue. Bug zappers do no good at all against mosquitoes. In fact, Rowley claims they have found more mosquitoes in yards with zappers than without them. Rowley suggests that to avoid mosquito bites, you avoid dawn and dusk, when they are biting; that you wear heavy outer clothing; and that you coat exposed skin with DEET, which is contained in most insect repellants. Other studies show that garlic juice can be lethal to mosquitoes and is an effective repellent. If you eat bananas, your skin will exude an odor that mosquitoes find attractive. And you can always hope for the world’s best insect control: drought.

Fast Fact
In the summer of 2003, South Korea’s biggest mobile phone company, SK Telecom, began offering customers a special ringtone that repels mosquitoes. For a small extra charge, subscribers can download a sound wave inaudible to human ears but annoying to mosquitoes.

Tomatoes to the Rescue
Entomologist Michael Roe was working to design a synthetic insecticide when he discovered that one of the compounds he was working with was very similar in molecular structure to an organic compound that’s found in tomatoes. Additional tests showed that the tomato compound repelled many insects such as cockroaches, ticks, and mosquitoes. It’s part of a tomato plant’s natural defense system against invading insects. When isolated, the chemical is so effective, in fact, that it works as well as DEET, and it lasts longer than DEET does as well. According to an article in “Discovery” magazine, a company called Insect Biotechnology picked up on the discovery and is working to bring this tomato-based insect repellent to the market.

Combating Mosquitoes
In the 1960s DDT was used widely to combat mosquitoes. Not only did DDT have widespread damaging effects on the environment, but the mosquitoes rapidly evolved to become immune to it anyway. An entomologist in Egypt studied some dying mosquito larvae he found in a puddle and discovered they were being killed by a bacterium which was destroying their guts. He called it Bacillus thuringiensis israelensis (shortened to Bti) and discovered that Bti also kills blackflies (a close relative of the mosquito) but doesn’t affect anything else, whether insect or animal. Bti, which can be grown in nutrient solutions, now serves as one of the world’s foremost anti-mosquito measures. It prevents the larvae from developing into adults. Commercial products utilizing Bti go by names such as Mosquito Dunks or Mosquito Bits and can be purchased at many gardening and hardware outlets.

Causing Confusion
A mosquito has very sensitive sensors on the ends of her antennae which help her home in on sources of heat, humidity, and carbon dioxide. Most repellents work by confusing her sense of smell causing disorientation, making the insect believe that she is flying towards a colder, dryer, carbon-dioxide free environment. Citronella repels mosquitoes because it irritates the sensors on their feet.

The Danger of Mosquitoes
When Teddy Roosevelt returned from an expedition to the Amazon, he was asked what the most dangerous animal he had encountered was. He replied without hesitation, "An insect!" and indeed it was so. Roosevelt contracted malaria in Brazil and was so weakened that he never fully recovered and died not long afterward. Until the 1900s, half of all human deaths could be traced to mosquitoes because of the two devastating diseases they carry: malaria and yellow fever.

Malaria alone has caused more deaths than all wars put together. The word malaria means "bad air", which was thought to be the source of the disease. South American Indians used cinchona bark to combat malaria for hundreds of years. One member of a Spanish exploratory party was left for dead when he came down with malaria. Thirsty, he crawled to a pool of water that had collected on the ground and drank. He made a remarkable recovery, and when his party passed by again they were amazed to find him well again. He showed them the pool he had drunk from— there was a piece of cinchona floating in it. Cinchona bark is still used to treat malarial symptoms today. It's called quinine.

Fast Fact
If a pond or puddle dries up, the mosquito eggs can lay dormant for five years or more until it fills up again, allowing the eggs to continue their development. Eggs are also able to stay viable throughout the winter and hatch in the spring.

Panama Canal
During the digging of the Panama Canal during the late 1890s, malaria and yellow fever caused so many deaths that the project had to be halted. At the same time, many soldiers in the Spanish American War were dying from the diseases faster than they were dying from combat. At that time, the cause was unknown. A doctor in Havana named Carlos Finlay was the first to guess that the mosquito was the carrier. He was thought to be a crackpot and was tauntingly called the "Mosquito Man", but several other doctors were so desperate to find a cure that they decided to test the theory. James Carroll and Jesse Lazear, two doctors who were working alongside researcher Major Walter Reed, volunteered to let mosquitoes feed on patients ill with yellow fever. Then, taking a desperate but necessary chance, they let the mosquitoes feed on their own arms. The theory was proven when both men became ill with the disease. Carroll recovered, but Lazear later died of the illness. In October of 1900, Major Walter Reed announced to the American Public Health Association that "the mosquito serves as the intermediate host for the parasite of yellow fever." An anti-mosquito campaign was launched, and in 1914 the Panama Canal was completed.

Today, a vaccine is available to prevent yellow fever. However, malaria still kills more people than any other communicable disease except tuberculosis even though it is curable if diagnosed and treated quickly. Major Walter Reed now has hospital named after him.

Antics & Anecdotes

When the British army asked for help from the nearby French units while fighting in Macedonia, the French commander replied, “Regret that my army is in hospital with malaria.” It turned out that the Germans were suffering from malaria too and could not strike.
During World War II, General Douglas MacArthur went to malaria expert Dr. Paul Russell for help. In the South Pacific, a third of MacArthur’s troops were coming down with malaria, and a third were recuperating from it, leaving only a third of the men fit to fight. Dr. Russell toured the area and found that the troops were not taking their Atabrine pills, which prevent malaria. He also discovered that the anti-malarial units which were trained to prevent the spread of mosquitoes were considered so unimportant that they were never even transported to the front. Russell recommended that commanders ensure all the men took their Atabrine pills and that the anti-mosquito squads be given top priority. Within weeks malaria rates began dropping in the Allied forces while remaining high in the Japanese forces who failed to combat the mosquito and continued to suffer from high rates of malaria.
Besides inventing Morse code, Samuel Morse was also an accomplished artist. After painting a picture of a man suffering the agonies of death, he showed it to a friend who happened to be a doctor. "What's your opinion?" Morse asked. "Malaria," replied the doctor.

Fast Fact
About 40 percent of the native population of Papua New Guinea enjoy a genetic mutation that makes them resistant or immune to malaria.

Joke
"This is a perfect spot for a picnic."
"It must be. Fifty million mosquitoes can't be wrong!"

Quips & Quotes
"We hope that, when the insects take over the world, they will remember with gratitude how we took them along on all our picnics." -Bill Vaughan
“Little things do matter - try sleeping in a room with a mosquito.” -anon.

Fast Fact
Folks in the Lomelina Valley in Italy sponsor an annual Mosquito Killing Championship. Contestants are invited to capture and kill as many mosquitoes as they can with their bare hands in a five minute period. The contest is organized by the local Anti-Mosquito League.

Word Wizard
The word “canapé” which now means a tasty appetizer of bread with a bit of cheese spread on it, originally meant “canopy” denoting a canopy of mosquito netting covering a couch or bed. Canopy then came to mean the bed or couch itself, and then came into English as a fancy tidbit of meat or cheese spread upon a “bed” of cracker or bread.

Quick Quiz
1.      What’s the average time between the mosquito bite and the itch?
2.      What’s the maximum possible life span of a mosquito?
3.      What state has the greatest number of mosquito species in the U.S.?

Answers
1.      The average time between the bite and the itch is three minutes.
2.      A really lucky mosquito can live four to five months before dying of old age.
3.      Florida has 77 different kinds of mosquito.

Joke-
A Texan went to Maine on vacation and spent the whole night telling the hotel owners how big everything was in Texas. Late at night after he had gone to bed, 3 chickens that had been scared by a fox flew into the Texan's open window. He sat up in bed and beat the air with his pillow until the chickens found their way back out the window. At breakfast the next morning the Texan told his hosts that he was going to spend all of his vacations in Maine from now on. When they asked why, he replied, "I only saw three mosquitoes all night long, and they were little ones!"

The Final Fact
A touring troupe appearing in India during monsoon season was amazed that the audience started clapping as soon as the curtains opened and continued to clap during the entire performance. When they asked the theater manager about this, he replied that it was not applause they were hearing — it was dozens of people swatting at mosquitoes.

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