It's probably for the best that mosquitoes havent evolved so they're bites aren't itchy

Comments

• ccunning@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  I was thinking it would be to their benefit to evolve to not make us itch. If they could just steal my blood without being an irritant it would make me less aggressive towards them…

  …but since they’re infamously disease vectors it would actually be to my (and humanities) detriment long term.

  So, sadly, I guess I’m happy they haven’t…

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  • vk6flab@lemmy.radio ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    Sorry to be the bearer of bad news.

    Mosquito bites itch after they bite, not while they bite. The itch is your body responding to the saliva it injected.

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    • ccunning@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      It’s not news to me.

      I still am motivated to kill them before or after they bite because they are a known irritant. If they just took a tiny bit of my blood without the irritation I wouldn’t be so motivated to kill them

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• aaa@lemmy.sdf.org ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  perhaps humans have evolved to be irritated by mosquito bites.

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• SolidShake@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  I don’t get itchy when I get bit. I get a little red dot for maybe 4 hours then nothing

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  • ccunning@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    Image

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    • SolidShake@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      Yeah. Weak super power but marvel might pick me up.

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  • shalafi@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    Suffered as a child, but they hardly bother me now. At sundown my wife and I are often in the yard and I don’t even notice. My wife is an itchy mess for an hour.

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• jared@mander.xyz ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  *Come on now, don’t give them ideas. *

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• lime@feddit.nu ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  ticks don’t itch

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  • starlinguk@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    They often do when you’ve been bitten before.

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• InvalidName2@lemmy.zip ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  I don’t think of it in that mind frame, to be honest.

  To me it’s our bodies that have evolved a general reaction to foreign proteins / materials with an inflammatory response (which can feel itchy), though that’s obviously the watered down way of thinking about it that doesn’t really capture the full picture.

  Often times I don’t even know there’s a mosquito on me unless I happen to see it. Some species are just super tiny and don’t seem to cause any pain when they feed. Others are so large that they “itch” (i.e. you can feel their presence) just from them landing on you, whether they have time to bite or not. Either way, it’s not the pain or itchiness that motivate me to keep their populations under control, it’s primarily concerns over the spread of disease.

  For most species of mosquito, humans aren’t really their primary target nor are humans the main source of food for them. And, it’s only been in very recent history that humanity has had any ability to control mosquito populations on a large scale, not even a blip on the evolutionary scale. So give it time, maybe those of us who don’t get itchy from mosquito bites are the fittest amongst us from an evolutionary standpoint and eventually those genes that lead to itchy reactions will go extinct. But I don’t think that there’s any significant evolutionary pressure on mosquitos as a result of how itchy or not itchy their bites are.

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• Oka@sopuli.xyz ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  Already did.

  When i lived in San Francisco, the mosquito bites were often not painful or only mild. But the itch is the same.

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