George A. Bickford, age 9, of Nashville, Tenn., for his question:
Where do mosquitoes spend the winter?
Nature, it seems, does not always arrange things for our convenience. We find winter too chilly for picnics and outdoor living. And so do the pesky mosquitoes. Come the first warm days and off we go with a bag of sandwiches to enjoy life under the sky. And what do we find? The air is a‑buzz with a horde of bloodthirsty mosquitoes. Why can't these pests appear in the winter and leave the summer for us to enjoy in peace?
The fact is that mosquitoes also find the winter outdoors too cold far comfort. Besides, winter reduces their food supply. The male mosquito foods on plants and fruit juices. The female foods on blood. Plant sap and fruits are scarce in winter. Frogs, lizards, birds, mice and other bland banks which provide Mrs. Mosquito's food are either far away or asleep and safely hidden.
Insects do not brow up bit by bit from babyhood. Their life cycle is a series of very different stages. Most insects sloop through the winter in the first egg stage. The eggs hatch in the warm days of early spring. And this is how almost all the pesky mosquitoes survive the winter.
The mosquito is an amphibious insect. The first three quarters of its life cycle is spent in the water. We notice this past only when full grown, it takes to the air.
Life begins when Mama Mosquito lays a clutch of eggs on the surface of a swamp, a stagnant lake or a slow moving stream. The eggs are little cones, 50 to 200 of thorn fixed together to form a floating raft. If the weather is warm, the egg batch into hammer headed little water grubs.
This is the larva stage. The grubs are swimmers, hungry for bits of plant and animal debris they find in the water. Also, they are air brothers. They must come up to the surface for oxygen. In a week or so these wiggly follows are ready to enter into the pupa stage. They rise to the surface and seal themselves inside chrysalises. There they rest, hanging from the surface of the water. In a few days they are ready to hatch. The chrysalises hatch. The chrysalises crack open and then, long winged insects struggle out.
Half of those insects will be females, ready to a new generation of eggs in a week or so, a female lays several broods of eggs in her busy summer season. She usually perishes with the first cold days of fall. A few females may survive the cold winter and be all ready to start laying in the spring
In any case, the last brood of eggs will lie dormant until spring. In Alaska, mosquito eggs sleep through the winter under a blanket of snow. We are lucky that the vast majority of adult mosquitoes cannot cope with the winter. For then their enemies are also scarce. Nature arranges things so that the hordes of mosquitoes arrive in time to provide dinners for the birds, frogs, toads and insect eating bats.