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Flashback Friday: Protect Yourself From Mosquitoes
🕑 Added 2021-07-30 16:45:07 +0000 UTCSummer's here, and we can look forward to picnics, hiking, camping –– but there's also the mosquito bites that come with spending time outdoors. Mosquitoes are the deadliest animals in the world to us humans. The diseases they transmit –– which include malaria, dengue, yellow fever, West Nile and Zika –– kill hundreds of thousands of people each year.
You can learn more about mosquitoes and how to keep yourself and your home safe from these persistent pests with these two videos from our archives. Our most popular Deep Look episode to date, “How Mosquitoes Use Six Needles to Suck Your Blood,” explains why they’re so good at getting humans sick. Researchers say it’s the effectiveness of their bite. A mosquito’s mouth, called a proboscis, isn’t just one tiny spear. It’s a sophisticated system of thin needles, each of which pierces the skin, finds blood vessels and makes it easy for mosquitoes to suck blood out of them.
“This Dangerous Mosquito Lays Her Armored Eggs,” focuses on the white-striped Aedes aegypti mosquito. Their eggs are hardy; they can dry out, but remain alive for months, waiting for a little water so they can hatch into squiggly larvae.
