Word: culex
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...animal, as your excellent "Hanoi Fever" story implied [Oct. 10]. Alexander the Great is only one of the mildly illustrious millions it has felled. But your illustration showed a male mosquito, and it is the female who is more deadly, being the "biter." I recently photographed a nonfatal femme Culex just emerged from its pupa, proboscis and all. After...
...Gebhardt had good reason to suspect snakes. The Culex tarsalis mosquito, principal carrier of the WEE virus, hatches out in swamps. Early in the spring, when birds are still scarce, the female mosquito lights on the nearest creature for the blood meal she needs before she can lay her eggs. Dr. Gebhardt figured that the victim might be a snake just emerging drowsily from hibernation. Starting in 1961, he hiked miles through swamps and caught plenty of garter, gopher and blue racer snakes, but found virus in only...
...cold-blooded animals-such as lizards and frogs. These findings do not mean that reptiles or birds that carry the virus for a while should be exterminated, Dr. Gebhardt emphasizes. What they do show is that mosquito-control spraying should be timed to hit the swamps in spring, when Culex tarsalis is hatching, so that bloodthirsty females of the species get no chance to dine on creatures in which the virus hibernates...
Houston's outbreak-the first in the city's history-began in the dingy Negro sections, where mosquitoes breed in open drainage ditches and get into houses through tattered window screens. But the disease quickly spread to all areas of the city, probably borne by the female Culex quinquefasciatus mosquito, a night biter that acquires the virus from birds (and possibly small animals and reptiles), which are thought by most experts to be the natural reservoirs of the disease. SLE attacks the spinal cord and the brain, destroying nerve cells and frequently damaging the small blood vessels that...
...them to take seed from their lips. At downtown Mirror Lake last week, old folks were feeding pigeons, house sparrows, mockingbirds and grackles. while laughing gulls, ducks and herons splashed in and out of the water. There, in a half-hour, health workers easily caught 70 mosquitoes (Culex nigripalpus, one of the species now known to carry SLE virus) in a small trap. At another lake, irate residents stoned health department workers who were trying to trap ducks merely to draw a blood specimen for virus testing...