You never see a mosquito and think they won’t bite you, but only female mosquitoes take blood meals…so where are all the males?
Both males and females eat sap, nectar, honeydew, and plant juices, but in the Cretaceous period, females adapted to eat blood as well.1They need the protein to make eggs. Nowadays, females much prefer blood to sugar. So, is it because I am not a plant that I don’t notice any male mosquitoes? Or is it that I only notice the ones that bite me?
Prior to 2016, nobody had ever seen a male mosquito feed on blood, but then blood feeding was observed in Culex quinquefasciatus. In fact, the authors note that feeding males blood significantly shortens their lives. Not surprisingly, the same may be true in humans.2Although the author of this letter remarks that drinking bat blood is a risk for contracting rabies. Transmission of rabies usually saliva-to-peripheral-nerve, and Dean et al don’t put too much truck in the idea of blood-to-mouth transmission. Neither do Fatima et al. That letter writer just doesn’t want us drinking bat blood. Must be hoarding it for himself. Fortunately for male C. quinquefasciatus, they are only able to eat the blood if you give it to them; they don’t have adequate hardware to pierce the skin.3Although can you really call this a significant finding? If you put me in a box with only blood to eat, I’d probably eat it too.
Of the 3,000+ species of mosquitoes, relatively few species’ males are attracted to humans at all. When the ‘squitoes are horny, the males may swarm to get with the ladies, but obviously that doesn’t happen all the time. Klowden writes that, at “specific times of the day, males swarm above visual markers such as vegetation and fence posts, often in the vicinity of vertebrate hosts. By some unknown mechanism, females are attracted to the swarms and fly into them to mate.”4These two sentences are the only insight into the location of male mosquitoes I have been able to find despite many searches on Google Scholar. Perhaps this is because “[m]ale mosquitoes, because they do not feed on blood, have been virtually ignored by biologists.” Timothy Winegard adds the following: “Like other flying insects, when ready to mate, male mosquitoes assemble over a prominent feature, ranging from chimneys to antennas to trees to people….Mosquito swarms have been photographed extending 1,000 feet into the air, resembling a tornado funnel cloud.”
So, now we know where the males are on select occasions. Unfortunately, despite reviewing hundreds of results of various searches of the literature and two books, all we know is that you can see a bunch of them when they are horny. Indeed, as Klowden writes, “[m]ale mosquitoes, because they do not feed on blood, have been virtually ignored by biologists.”