Scanning Electron Micrographs and Educational Resources

This is a Black Salt Marsh mosquito Aedes taeniorhynchus of the Southeast U S. This one looks like someone swatted it. Its long snout or proboscis has been bent and broken, and its wings and legs are crushed beneath it. It punctures your skin with the proboscis and draws blood, which it mixes with anticoagulants to keep the blood from clotting in its gut.

With its abdomen full of blood, it is too heavy to fly. To get away it makes a controlled descent to a safe spot nearby. There it constricts its abdomen, squeezing the water out of the blood and through its abdominal wall. Now light enough to fly, it takes off leaving behind a large droplet of water.

Bug Eyes

Insect's compound eyes cannot see fine details clearly, so they do not rely on eyesight the way people do. Honey bee eyesight, for example, is well understood. To a person, looking through the eyes of a honey bee is like looking through a wall of glass bricks. The spherical surface of their compound eye makes depth perception impossible, so they crash into each other entering and leaving the hive.

Mosquitoes have eyes similar to bees. While they may investigate a blurred visual image that could be a blood host (it's hard for them to tell a person from a cow or a tree trunk), it is motion and their keen sense of smell that leads them to the cow. As they get closer the visual image loses definition. When they land on you they can see the world above them, but their feet on your skin are a blur. Their eyes look for danger from above (cow's tail or hand coming to swat them), but heat sensors on the tips of their antennae lead them to where blood is closest to the skin, and that's where they bite.

Biting flies put you through a blender and drink you through a straw

This is the head of a biting midge or Culicoides furens. At the end of its snout or proboscis are lips that conceal serrated teeth. Like other flies it lives on a liquid diet, which it drinks through its proboscis.

The common housefly dissolves solid food by vomiting digestive juices on it and then sucks up the liquid meal.

The biting midge has a more direct approach to liquefying solid food. Using its knife-like serrated teeth in a scissors action, it minces your flesh into a puddle. Then it sucks the liquid out of the hole it carved in your skin.

Links to entomological sites

For mosquito information you can trust visit:

http://www.mosquito.org for the AMCA (The American Mosquito Control Association) web site.

http://www.ent.iastate.edu/ List for Iowa State University's Complete Entomology Index.