Word: mosquitoes
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...eggs she will lay a few days later -- from half a dozen to upwards of 300, depending on her species and the richness of her blood meal -- turn into larvae, which lead a complete aquatic life of their own and are as different from flying mosquitoes as seals are from buzzards. Not much water is needed: a tablespoon in an old beer can or tire casing is enough to provide a home for 200 of these little air-breathing water worms, but the more water the better. The larvae zip around, feeding on bacteria and bits of vegetation, which they...
...species -- the larva suddenly stops eating, curls up into a comma and becomes what is called a pupa. Over the next few days, it transforms itself like some buggy version of Terminator 2. Its nerves and muscles melt and reform with astonishing speed until the new adult mosquito sloughs the pupal skin, emerges at the surface and takes off. If one thinks of the humble, fishy mosquito larva as a distinct animal in its own right, then it is one of God's creatures for which resurrection and afterlife are scientific facts. Instead of dying, it sprouts wings and ascends...
Once airborne, the mosquito becomes a flying machine that puts state-of-the- art aeronautics to shame. Mosquitoes have range: though most live out their lives within a radius of a kilometer or two, some swamp species have been known to fly more than 160 km (100 miles). And they have maneuverability: a mosquito flying through a rainstorm can land safe and dry on the nape of your neck after dodging hundreds of drops that to it are as big as falling refrigerators...
...this makes the mosquito a formidable adversary, one that has caused no end of trouble for human beings. Malarial mosquitoes, some historians think, contributed to the fall of ancient Greece. Europeans of medieval times were tormented by the insect Chaucer knew as the midge; the English word mosquito, from the Spanish for "little fly," appeared in the 16th century, along with new and nastier New World species. In the 1880s the Frenchman Ferdinand de Lesseps, fresh from the triumph of building the Suez Canal, was utterly vanquished in his heroic effort to dig a canal across the Isthmus of Panama...
With the deployment of DDT in 1939, it looked as if final victory over the mosquito might be at hand; and indeed, through the years chemical insecticides took such a toll on mosquito populations that yellow fever and other infections they carried became almost unheard-of in the developed world...