Pestilent Insect Has Angry Buzz.

Star (Christchurch), Issue 19118, 10 July 1930, Page 8

Pestilent Insect Has Angry Buzz.

Nature Notes.

By

James Drummond, F.L.S., F.Z.S.

A N INSECT about only an eighth of an inch long, with black legs and body and dark brown thorax covered densely with golden scales, is the pestilent fellow that annoys people with its high-pitched vicious notes more than with its moderately painful sting. Its title, Culex pervigilans, means the very vigilant mosquito. Its domestic affairs have been pried into by Mr D. H. Graham, a Lyttelton boy who, devoting his life to scientific research, is

doing valuable work at the Portobello Biological Research Station, Port Chalmers. Mr Graham has seen a female mosquito of this species select a leaf or stick in the water and there lay her milky-white, cigarshaped eggs. The eggs, from 78 to 294 in number, form a boat-shaped raft. The raft’s great lightness, its shape, and the surface tension of the water, keep it afloat in all weathers. If the eggs are submerged, a film of air quickly brings them to the surface. Many rafts, drifting together, form stars, triangles or rows, which line the water’s edge like flotillas of tiny canoes. When an egg-shell bursts open, the end of a cap, shaped like a saucer, falls back on a hinge, and the baby mosquito emerges. For five minutes, the lower surface of a raft may be a mass of ugly little babies, struggling out of the openings, uncovered by the cap.

The young pass into a chrysalis stage, spend from two days to five days in that condition, and then come forth as perfect mosquitoes armed with stings, if they are females, v