MALE MOSQUITO FAMILY IDLER.

Dunstan Times, Issue 2587, 5 June 1911, Page 2

MALE MOSQUITO FAMILY IDLER.

Women’s rights are an accomplished fact in the mosquito community. Only the women can bite. The men stay at home and make the fires and sharpen up tpare incisors for their wives. They are vegetarians almost exclusively, living largely on fruit. Not so the womenfolk. They drink blood—preferably human blood.

No self-respecting lady-anopheles, for instance, would think of laying an egg before sue has dined on blood. When the night mists settle, and the club women of the mosquito nation have sucked cocktails from swamp-sockets to whet their appetite for human gore — then let man beware! The Anopheles is not the only black sheep of the family. The Stegomyia is really much blacker. He is responsible for the fever camps of Havana and Panama, and through the fixing of that responsibility the way is cleared for the prevention in the future of all such fe-, ver camps. For it was discovered and demonsti’ated —who does not know the story of the heroism of the doctor who gave his life to the experiment? —that the yellow fever germ was carried by the Stegomyia, and by him alone. A mosquito has more varied life than most mortals. First, he is an egg, one of three hundred or so brothers and sisters, in his corner of the swamp. Then he hatches out a larva, commonly called “wriggler,” a-little hoyden about an inch long, that jerks around in its »ative pool. His first instinct is to hunt for food.

Now comes the first great crisis in the mosquito’s life, the coining of age. The larva, now pupa, has entirely stopped wriggling by this time, and rests quietly at the surface of the water, like a tiny boat. To get out of that boat without upsetting it is a ticklish proposition. To stretch her wing and fly ashore is a still more startling feat. John Jones’ flying to long Island from the deck of the Konigin Smith isn’t in the same class at all, for he had tried hm wings before. Not so the young mosquito; neither she nor anyone else has ever used those wings. If no malicious water-bug rocks the tippy craft, and if the wings are m good shape and geared right, we may assume that our newly-fledged mosquito will unquestionably reach the shore in safety. She will unquestionably feel faint and hungry. Hunger, the Now York Evening Post informs the public, is destined to he the soul of her life. That life may be spent at home or abroad, in strife, or at ease, according to sex and caste, but it will he one of incessant hunger, satisfied only by occasional orgies of eating. She will live two or three weeks, or, perhaps, longer. Perhaps she will become a confirmed dyspeptic after hoi first repast and die young. Perhaps, it she is one of the fittest of the females of the l|nood she may crawl into some cozy cellar when the cold weather comes on and survive to lay eggs next spring in the family rain barrel. Tims she will claim the proud honor of propagating her kind.