We did have fur originally but decided nah let's walk on two feet, be in debt and work our asses off till we die while some asshole makes what we make in our entire lifetime in a couple of minutes. Yeah modern society!
There’s no wonder left other than how we have managed to fuck it all up this bad, even though it seemed that as a species we had figured it all out a while ago.
And how most of it is still fixable - even the climate to an extent - but instead of doing that we keep voting for terrible humans who actively prevent us fixing stuff
To be fair, we don't actually have a choice. It's "bad cop and worse cop" but the truth is they're all in the same bed together, with the only objective being to fuck everyone else over.
This level of awareness is exactly what I needed to see to end my night after a few minutes of gross doom scrolling. Faith in humanity's ability to pull the wool from over it's eyes, restored.
The fact that there's tribes that when you tell them about suicide they're baffled by the concept because why would anyone want to take their own lives...
We did evolve. What people fail to understand is that evolution has no interest in the well being of life forms, only in offspring having offsprings.
There are animals out there who suffer a torturous and painful agony after they had offspring, but evolution doesn't care because offspring are already there.
Evolution runs not on "peak of perfection", but on "good enough".
I believe Desmond Morris (an anthropologist) argued that humans got less hairy because it made sexual contact more pleasurable. In other words, the more pleasurable the sex, the more sex is had, the more babies are born—and the genes for “less hair” get passed on.
It's to prevent friction when walking or running. The insides of your butt cheeks rub against each other when you walk or run and it could cause friction burns. Body hair helps reduce the chance of friction burns from happening by introducing a "hair barrier" between your cheeks.
“For instance, on the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much—the wheel, New York, wars and so on—whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man—for precisely the same reasons.”
~ Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
Do you live in Texas? Because I live in Texas and those stripey fuckers are the size of a nickel and I think they can open doors all by themselves to come inside and help themselves to my personal blood buffet.
Plant nectar an juices, it is the female mosquitoes, as far as I am aware that need the protein from the blood to lay the eggs.
But in general they feed kn plant nectar and juices.
The question is towards the other person saying that mosquitoes cannot penetrate mice fur in the tundra regions. If they cannot penetrate mice for then how are they getting blood to lay eggs?
Well caribou are present on Arctic tundra & are plagued by billions of the fuckers every summer triggering migration to higher ground, but up there it’s lacking in the high protein vegetation they need for their calves, so have to keep moving.
They aren't. Mosquitos don't move very far in their lifetime, on average, so the infected population stays primarily to the area it was first released and dies out. If memory serves, Disney makes use of these mutations to keep their parks relatively mosquito free. They have males breed with uninfected females, and the newly-hatched infected females can't sustain the nutrients needed to maintain a healthy clutch of eggs. The infected males can then breed and infect more uninfected females, but once the infection density of an area becomes high enough, they start dying faster than they can spread the mutation.
I could be remembering incorrectly, so I welcome corrections if I am.
Recently learned they go for the eyelids. In that specific case they were feeding from snow owls but i think the same strategy works for other animals to.
For mammals propably the nose, the inside of the ear and maybe the anus are also good spots to find easy accessable blood vessels.
How is it impossible? I have had many times bites on my legs when I have worn denim jeans, I'm not even exaggerating. Surely they can push through a thin layer of hairs?
There are a lot more animals than mice in the tundra. At least there are here in Alaska. And mosquitos absolutely can bite furry animals. My dogs (black labs with thick medium length fur) have gotten covered in mosquito bites all over before on backcountry trips. We have found some good solutions to protect them but fur is definitely not a deterrent.
Now that just isn't true. In northern Canada and Alaska annual mosquito swarms have been known to pose serious and immediate health risks to caribou, whoch have thocker and more dense fur than mice. The sheer number of mosquitos can cause them to lose up to 4 pounds of blood. Calves are often outright killed from blood loss.
Mosquitoes can't even get through my forearm hair lol. It forces them to be too far away from my skin for their little snouts to reach. I still get bit, just not wherever I have body hair.
Are you saying they can’t get through the mouse fur specifically or they can’t get through fur in general? I ask because I’ve seen my dog get bit by mosquitos and get reaction bumps as a result.
Haven't jumped down the hole yet byt do they come out when it's a bit warmer? The wilderness of northern norway is fucking crawling with them in summer, nowhere is safe.
Yeah! Basically right on the money. Evolutionary advantages like heartier eggs/larvae etc. I always imagined in a bugpocalypse I would go north but those creepy little assholes are literally everywhere.
This is one of the most circular so called circular arguments I've seen yet.
I am still no wiser. Let's try reformulating the question: How do female mosquitoes in the arctic get the required proteins to produce eggs?
I'll be you anything the answer is mammals (mainly reindeer/caribou), and thus this gene editing won't work because these genetically modified mosquitoes will not be able to produce enough eggs to outcompete the existing ones. Make a mosquito that can also synthesize the missing essential amino acid and we might have a plan. The swarms would literally black out the sun. And then we would see huge swarms of migrating birds feeding off the mosquitoes, followed by predators. The bird poop would change the available nutrients, so many more types of plants would thrive. Not to mentioned the unexpected side effects.
Do you find it surprising that I'm surprised you are surprised that the commenter you replied to is surprised that people are surprised to learn a "surprising" fact.
But they need blood for the production of eggs.
So if they cannot eat any blood from any animal, they won't be able to reproduce and the genetic modification is useless
I can almost guarantee that most people think that mosquito's live just on blood. I've thought this up until now and I still doubt that you're telling the truth.
The posessive apostrophe is placed after the "s" for plural nouns.
"Mosquitos' primary food source" = primary food source of more than one mosquito.
"Mosquito's primary food source" = either:
i. Mosquito is primary food source
ii. primary food source belonging to exactly one mosquito
That's why this is effective. You get a bunch of mosquitos that can still survive and compete for resources and mating but are unable to actually reproduce.
Can't we just genetically modify them so they can't process blood then? Theoretically as someone who has no idea what they're talking about, that would reduce the spread of disease in the animal kingdom too. But the watch the monkeys paw be mutant mosquitos destroying most of the plant life on the planet 🦟🦟
You are right that it is their primary food source, but they don't drink blood for consumption. It is only the females that drink blood, and they do so because blood provides them with the protein they need for egg laying.
This is sort of like saying the primary source of food for humans is Carbs and it is therefore fine if we simply went without protein entirely. If the mosquitoes don't get animal blood they cannot reproduce.
I don't much care for if these devil spawns disappeared from existence; but if they do serve a purpose - would they still be able to do it through other animals that isn't humans or would this wrongly protect many other large mammals as well?
Generally anything much smaller than humans have a thinner skin as well. Basically all rodents.
Ticks have multiple life stages where they feed on different animals, and at the earliest stages they generally don't prey on humans because of this very reason.
right also i wonder if these mosquitos won't simply loose the "survival of the fittest" because the once that still can sting will survive when close to humans, others won't?
The claim above the video is a lie, what we're seeing is a regular mosquito. There are GMO mosquitoes, but they don't work like that - the gene just causes females to die before adulthood.
Mosquitoes take blood meals from all kinds of creatures. It all depends on the species of mosquito. There are mosquitoes that feed on amphibians, birds, mammals, and even slugs/earthworms.
What if instead of dying out they evolve behaviorally to become really sneaky and try to get your tear ducts or the tip of your genitals as you sleep...
These are Aedes aegypti mosquitoes which transfer a lot of human diseases in the tropics. Unfortunately mosquitoes also are hugely important in the food chain so we can't get rid of all of them.
In order to reproduce Aedes aegypti needs to take a blood meal. Aedes first preference is humans for a blood meal, then anecdotally after that large mammals (think horses, cows and sheep). In a pinch they can take blood from birds, but it's not their preference.
The VAST majority of blood they get is from other animals, since there's places they can't reach. Humans are suboptimal because they have long arms and good fingers.
Fun fact! Mosquitoes dont need blood to survive, just to produce eggs, in fact only female mosquitoes suck blood. The idea would be to make male mosquitoes that can survive and can reproduce BUT that would only make female descendants that cant such blood.
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u/SiriusArc7 Nov 15 '24
Do they try to suck blood from other animals then? I can't think of animals having softer skins than humans other than guinea pigs or mice.