Let’s face it, for anybody heading to the great outdoors, the chances of getting through the summer without being bitten by a mosquito are pretty slim — but while we may not be able to prevent the inevitable bite, let’s at least find out a bit more about what really causes that little bump with the big itch. I’m Jim Metzner, and this is the Pulse of the Planet, presented by the American Museum of Natural History.
“The mouth part consists of several different structures.”
Varuni Kulasekera is a research scientist at the American Museum of Natural History. She tells us that the mouth of a mosquito is a fairly complicated organ — a combination of parts which work together to extract blood.
“It’s a piercing and sucking kind of mouth part that the mosquitoes have…The mouth is like several needles covered by a tube and when they’re taking a blood meal, the tube bends and the needles pierce the skin and go inside the body and find the vein so that they can take blood.”
But while these piercing and sucking mouth parts are making their way towards your bloodstream, there’s an important chemical reaction going on as well.
“When a mosquito bites they will put saliva into your body because the mosquito saliva has chemicals, anticoagulants, that will stop the blood from clotting.”
Once your body senses that it is being attacked by this mosquito saliva, it releases its own chemicals, called histamines, to fight off this intrusion. And it’s these histamines, released by your immune system, which cause the mosquito bite to itch.
Pulse of the Planet is presented by the American Museum of Natural History. Additional funding for this series has been provided by the National Science Foundation. I’m Jim Metzner.