Swat you see is swat you get, you little buggers

By Sameh Fahmy
Gannett News Service

Mosquitoes are more than an annoyance. They can transmit malaria, yellow fever, dengue fever, and the potentially deadly West Nile virus.

But you already knew that. Here are 14 things you didn't know about the little bloodsuckers:

• "Mosquito" is a Spanish and Portuguese word meaning "little fly." The British, who call Band-aids plasters and cookies biscuits, used to call them "gnats."
  
  
• There are more than 2,500 species of mosquitoes worldwide, about 200 in the United States.

  A new species, called Anopheles grabhamii, was discovered in the Florida Keys in 2001.

• Male mosquitoes are attracted to females by the distinct sound of their wing beat. The attraction is so irresistible that a power plant in Canada kept malfunctioning until engineers realized that thousands of dead male mosquitoes were gumming it up. Apparently the plant sounded like their next fling.
  
  
• A female mosquito (the only ones that bite) may probe your skin up to 20 times before finding the right blood vessel.

  She injects a substance that keeps your blood from coagulating, to make sipping it easier.

• A mosquito has a nerve in its stomach that lets it know when it's full. If you cut that nerve, it keeps sucking blood until it explodes.
  
  
• Mosquitoes almost moved Memphis, Tenn.: An 1878 yellow fever outbreak killed more than 5,000 of the city's 33,000 residents.

  After the outbreak, some town leaders wanted to level the city, salt the earth and re-establish the town elsewhere.

• The mosquito-borne West Nile virus was first identified in 1937 in Uganda near the western bank of the Nile Valley.

  It was first seen outside that region in Israel in the 1950s and later in Europe and other parts of the Middle East. In 1999, it was first seen in the United States in New York City.

• So how did the virus cross the Atlantic? Nobody knows for sure, but there are a few theories.

  Theory A: Infected mosquitoes stowed away on a flight to the United States.

  Theory B: A bird carrying high levels of the virus is illegally imported or is blown across the Atlantic by the jet stream or freak storms and is later bitten by a mosquito.

  Another theory: West Nile virus is a bioterrorism agent introduced by Saddam Hussein's agents. (This was proposed by a columnist for the right-leaning www.newsmax.com).

• Forty-one states have official state insects or butterflies, but no state has chosen mosquitoes as its bug of choice, possibly because mosquitoes bite and sometimes kill people.
  
  
• Mosquitoes aren't all bad: They're food for other insects, fish, frogs, bats and birds. They also help pollinate plants.
  
  
• For the most part, mosquitoes feed on nectar or rotting fruit. The females drink blood only when they're ready to lay eggs.
  
  
• A mosquito can find you from 65 to 115 feet away. She first smells the carbon dioxide and lactic acid you exhale, and as she gets closer she sees you moving. The heat your body generates guides her to the unprotected part of your body.
  
  
• A mosquito will drink two to three times her weight in blood. She's so heavy after a blood meal that she can barely fly.
  
  
• Good luck trying to find a place where mosquitoes don't live. They can be found at 8,000 feet up in the Himalayas, below sea level in the California desert, above the Arctic Circle and in the Sahara.