A kind of teenager mosquito can suddenly shoot its head forward from its body — stretching its neck into a skinny cord — to bite into another youngster. And that’s just one of the ways young mosquitoes kill other mosquitoes, a new study shows.
Over decades, scientist-cinematographer Robert Hancock and colleagues have filmed attacks by these Psorophora ciliata The unusual details of two other species of predatory moth larvae are also revealed. In their new study, he and his colleagues find that the launchers evolved independently in two species.
The third predator, also known as a “third” predator. SabethesThe other end of the mosquito larva is used. It takes only 15 milliseconds to hang its head in the water. To grasp prey using a hooking stroke of the breathing tube on its predatory bitt.Researchers report October 4th Annals of the Entomological Society of America.
The neck-stretching snatch of the Psorophora larva. The fluid may be pushed to the head by the mosquito, which might then power this lunge. When Hancock watches the mosquito’s body, segmented a bit like a string of alphabet-block beads, he can see two segments scrunching inward “accordion-like,” as if squirting fluid forward as the head shoots out.
The head can be launched to reach prey but holding onto it is a different matter. A clear view of the two brushes on the head can be seen in the video. As the head nears its victim, the brushes fan out into what the researchers call a “flimsy basketlike arrangement” that folds around the doomed prey.
This attack might make people think of mosquito bites as hypodermic blood-suckers, and stealthily hypodermic. That’s the adult bite from females craving a nutritional supplement for egg-laying. Mosquito eggs, however, hatch in water, and larvae don’t assume their dandelion-wisp flying form for weeks. During the aquatic phase, these larvae don’t look, or dine, like adult forms at all.
Larvae don’t bite people, and many just filter out edible crumbs afloat in water. The meat eaters, however, pounce so fast that the human brain can’t parse it. Hancock was fascinated from the time he was in 1980s class, seeing only blurry through the microscope while trying to explain the feeding behavior. The Toxorhynchites The mosquitoes that he was frustrated with then turned out to be one among the groups that developed head-launching larvae.
“If there’s any mosquito for all the mosquito haters to actually maybe not love but like, it’s Toxorhynchites,” says Hancock, now at Metropolitan State University of Denver. As iridescent adults they’re vegans, feeding largely on flower nectar. For larvae, it’s all meat, mostly other mosquitoes. Plus, he says, “They’re large, and they’re gorgeous.”
The new study found that the launch doesn’t extend as far as a head length, but ToxorhynchitesThe prey larva is aggressively attacked. In the videos, “by the time you would catch sight of it, there would be like a half of larva … as it shoved this thing in like it was a hot dog eating contest,” Hancock says.
He and his colleagues also captured a third species of meat-eating insect on film. SabethesThese animals are more flexible than carnivores. They still eat their meat at their head end, but the danger of getting snagged comes from their rear, the researchers’ videos show. They are similar to many mosquito larvae and often hang out in the water taking in oxygen via a siphon. It turns out that the tube doubles as a kind of food hook. This allows them to capture a target in just a few milliseconds.
“The thing about Sabethes is that they’re probably more like murderers because they really don’t ingest and consume entire prey larvae like the other two,” Hancock says. The insects gain some nutrition from nibbling, according to feeding tests.
Humans may be curious about why we spend so much money on pest control when our tiny cousins can do the job so well. For one thing, mosquito larvae stay underwater, says entomologist Don Yee of the University of Southern Mississippi in Hattiesburg, who wasn’t involved in the study. The two neck-stretcher groups can’t lift into the air and fly to the next water-filled tire or tree hole. You can see the aforementioned. Toxorhynchites, for instance, “likely would consume all other larvae,” he says. “[H]owever, there may be hundreds of such containers in the area.”
The neck-stretching is the opposite. Psorophora Yee states that mosquitoes can live in more water, so they could theoretically have a greater impact on reducing mosquito populations. In natural conditions, however, the predators will not be able to reduce mosquito populations as much as humans would prefer. Yee compares it with the African savanna. In photos, “you can see how many wildebeest there are. The lions can’t really control them.” In nature, after all, predators that thrive don’t wipe out their own prey.
