Buzzing Bastards

It wasn’t that long ago when Ethan was rarely bothered by mosquitos, but this year he’s being eaten alive by them.  Native and invasive mosquito species populations have exploded as a result of California’s significant rainfall during the Winter of 2022/2023.  The unexpected flooding gave mosquitoes more places to breed and global climate change is not helping one bit, as they thrive in warmth and humidity.  Ethan keeps scratching the red, itchy welts on his arms from all the mosquito bites that he received almost like as if he was living in some type of a tropical jungle.  Ethan cares about the environment, so he tries not to use mosquito sprays because it irritates his skin, and he knows they can harm marine life, pets, and children.  As sprays are released, water runoff can wash these chemicals from yards into storm drains and waterways where they poison fish and crustaceans.  Mosquito season usually begins in the spring and slows down in the fall, but recent studies have shown that it is getting longer, affording the insects more time to reproduce.  A mosquito day, one that you are likely to see mosquitos thriving, is a day with a relative humidity of 42% or higher, and daily minimum and maximum temperatures between 50-95ºF.

Mosquitos are attracted more to people that are sweating or breathing heavily and when Ethan hears them buzzing around, that makes him perspire and his anxiety sets in which causes him to panic, so he is getting more than your fair share of mosquito bites.  Some people can sit outside in nice weather and have no issues with mosquitoes, but Ethan attracts them like a magnet.  Mosquitoes don’t blindly land on things and hope they can feed, as they detect people by using chemosensory and thermal cues.  The vast majority of cells in the human body are not human, but in fact are bacteria that coexist peacefully and hitchhike in us.  Before birth, people are more or less sterile, having little to no microbes.  Within a few years, we’re covered in thousands of different species of microbes, and they colonize every millimeter of the body that’s exposed to the outside world.  By the time we enter kindergarten, we have vastly different populations living in the different habitats around our bodies. Even as adults and into old age, our microbiota continue to shift.  Every person has a certain odor that they give off, which is caused by the breakdown of bacteria on our skin.  It’s part of our natural make-up, and different people have different bacteria make-up, and this scent is not necessarily an odor that others can detect, but mosquitos can and this is how they choose the ones that they will bite.  Ethan thinks that all mosquitos are pointless, but a world without any mosquitos may not be the answer as Ethan has to look at the whole food chain and figure out who eats what, before eradicating an entire species.

Written for Fandango’s Story Starter #154.