Weekend Birdery: The Mosquito
The mosquito, according to leading organismal biologists, is not a bird. It does fly, and it is featured in this Weekend Birdery post. Yet it is not a bird. People in southern states sometimes like to quip that their state bird should be the mosquito, 
but as far as I can tell the distinction between birds and insects remains one of the areas of universally accepted scientific knowledge not actively disputed by conservative state and local officials in the South.
Anyway, I have two unresolved lines of inquiry concerning the biology of mosquitoes.
First: what is the trick to the way mosquitoes seem to vanish into thin air? Is there some set of tactical mosquito-flight maneuvers such that, if you knew them, you would know where to look for an offending mosquito after it has evaded your swat? For example, do they drop straight down, and/or zigzag backwards? Something different every time? In any case, if you haven’t lost track of the offender, it seems the most effective way to kill it is by clapping it between your hands. This reduces the chance that the air-flow disturbance caused by the swatting motion will simply push the mosquito out of harm’s way, as commonly results from the one-hand swat. A bazooka may work, too.
And second: wouldn’t it be better for mosquitoes, from an evolutionary perspective, if their proboscises didn’t cause such irritating reactions? I suppose the answer here is the fact that, even though the irritation leads to us making sporadic efforts to kill them, we don’t kill nearly enough of them to give rise to any selection effects.
Photograph by Darlyne A. Murawski.
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[...] For the past seven years, until this weekend, I have lived in “the South”—in a few different places in Alabama and Georgia. I grew up in Florida, which is also a southern state, obviously, though not always in the capital-s sense. All of my human neighbors over the years have been unfailingly pleasant and hospitable. But many of my non-human neighbors I most assuredly will not miss. Among them are, first and foremost, the American Cockroach; and second, the mosquito. [...]