Word: mosquitoe
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...mosquito, it seems, is essentially a tiny winged speck of libido. Here's what typically happens: the males form a hovering globular swarm, ranging from a softball-size band of a dozen to a ballroom-size throng of millions. To any female that may be around, the male buzzing sound is like a neon sign in front of a singles bar. She makes a beeline -- all right, a mosquitoline -- straight into the swarm. Once she's inside, the sound of her wings, beating 250 to 500 times a second, becomes the mosquito equivalent of a flirty hair flip. The males...
...Among mosquitoes, by the way, the "woman above" position is mandatory. Their sexual organs are weirdly like ours, with vaginas, ovaries, penises and testes. Their coupling takes four to 40 seconds, though in a few of the 2,500 known species male and female may remain locked together for more than an hour. They show every sign of ecstasy, but do they feel it? Mosquito Unit head Barnard looks pained. This is not the sort of question sober scientists are supposed to concern themselves with, and besides, there's nothing in the literature about it. "Well," he finally admits with...
...better be good, because in most mosquito species that have been studied it's strictly a one-night stand. The female has no further need of her partner or any other male for the rest of her life. She stores the sperm from her sole encounter in special sacs, fertilizing her own eggs every time she lays a batch, whether that is once or a dozen times...
...case, sex no longer rules her life; violence does -- and this is where we come in. To nourish and develop her eggs, she needs what entomologists call, with admirable directness, a "blood meal" -- and she needs a new one for every batch of eggs she lays. Every mosquito bite in the history of life on earth has been inflicted by a female. This is science, not misogyny...
When a blood-hungry mosquito lands on a human forearm -- or, more likely, on the eyelid of a cow, the haunch of a squirrel, the wing of a roosting bird or even the back of a caterpillar -- she goes to work with awesome efficiency. Her slender proboscis, consisting of two sharp and sometimes serrated cutting % tools surrounding a pair of tiny tubes, pierces the skin (and, if necessary, the cloth or feathers protecting it) and finds a capillary, bending to slide into the tiny blood vessel. Down one tube comes her saliva, which deadens sensation and blocks coagulation...