Mailing Mosquitoes

    The other day I read a news article about a professor at U.B.C. (University of British Columbia) who was doing research on the mosquitoes that live in BC.  He was trying to document how many different species mosquitoes there were in BC and where they lived.  He was asking the public to mail in the mosquitoes they had swatted to him.   People should include, along with the mosquitoes, the date they were squashed, the location using Latitude and Longitude ( which can be found on Google Maps), and an email address if they want a response about what species they had sent.

    Mosquitoes have long been the bane of my life and I welcome any kind of research on them that might give me more information about the pests, so I am mailing off a few of the mosquito corpses that I created yesterday.  At present the mosquitoes are still tolerable outside, but their numbers will become intolerable once the snow-pack on the mountains melts and the Fraser River floods, and that will be soon.

    In Alaska the biomass of mosquitoes has been calculated to be over 43,500 tonnes -- equivalent to 17 trillion mosquitoes.  There have been times that I feel like that number is close to what we sometimes get around here.

    We generally get three waves of mosquitoes.  As soon as the snow in the valley bottom melts, we get large dozy, slow, mosquitoes, that don’t really cause much of a problem and are easy to kill.  Then later we get the middle-size mosquitoes that are more in number and are irritating.  That is what we have presently.  Later they are joined by tiny mosquitoes, very fast and very aggressive.  They dive at you instead of buzzing around.  They are the worst.  

    I have long wondered what species of mosquitoes we have and I am happy someone is doing research on them.

See my paintings at:  davidmarchant2.ca