Tips for a comfortable, happy and safe visit ...

Mosquito Trivia ...

• A mosquito lives for approximately 20 days.
• Most mosquitoes fly less than a mile during their lifetime, but the ferocious salt-marsh mosquito - found in the Everglades and other coastal locations - can migrate 75 - 100 miles.
• Malaria parasites have evolved resistance to Chloroquine ... and then to several successor drugs.  This plant-derived medicine killed the parasites before they gained a foothold in their victim.
• Increase in travel and international trade has moved drug-resistant parasites around the world.
• There are approximately 2,700 species of mosquitoes, and more than 50 species are resistant to at least one insecticide.
• The male mosquito never sucks blood - he drinks nectar - and the females drink more often than necessary.
• Mosquito saliva and rat poison both contain anti-coagulants ... chemicals that prevent the blood from clotting.
• A mosquito has 47 teeth!
• The female mosquito will drink about 5-milllionths of a litre of blood in one sitting.
• A mosquito weighs about 2 - 2.5 milligrams (for an Aedes aegypti).
• A striff breeze will keep the mosquitoes at bay.  
• Mosquitoes can fly at an estimated 1 - 1.5 miles per hour.
• Bug zappers do work.  However, several critics say these zappers fry more beneficial insects than harmful ones, including the insects that eat mosquitoes.
• Swallows, Purple Martins, Bats and some predatory insects, enjoy a good meal of mosquitoes.  The ecological approach could be to put up a bat-house.  Bats gobble hundreds of mosquitoes each hour!
• A mosquito needs stagnant water to lay eggs.
• A mosquito can survive at sea level and up to altitudes as high as 10,800 feet (3,600 meters).
• Mosquitoes find you by sight - observing movement - and the infra-red radiation emitted by warm bodies.
• A mosquito can smell a new host from between 20 - 25 meters away.
• Some people are unusually attractive to mosquitoes, depending upon one or more of the 300-odd chemicals produced by the skin.
• Aside from skin chemicals, mosquitoes have other ways of finding you - they can detect both carbon dioxide and lactic acid (produced by metabolism in your muscles) in your breath.
• Mosquitoes prefer blondes and vegetarians.  They are attracted to one of the chemicals released by the metabolism used for digesting vegetables.
• Mosquitoes do not like Vitamin B or Iron.