Dark Banquet (37 page)

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Likewise, mosquitoes also feed on substances other than blood, namely nectar and fruit juice. In
Anopheles,
the genus that transmits malaria, only the female mosquito is obliged to seek out a blood meal. Unfortunately, the lack of card-carrying vampire status is completely irrelevant when one looks at the astronomical death toll associated with these insects. For example, it's been estimated that mosquito-transmitted malaria kills one person every twelve seconds.
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The oldest evidence for a blood-feeding lifestyle comes from a fossil “protomosquito” from the Triassic period (approximately 220 million years ago). Since there were no flowering plants present, and therefore no nectar to sip, the elongated proboscis of this insect presumably functioned in much the same way as it does in extant mosquitoes.
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It also comes in a second flavor (hemolymph), which is shed in a variety of arthropods groups.
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In a chemical cascade, the products of each step in the chemical reaction are integral to the step that follows.
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There is some debate as to just how many mosquitoes an aerial insectivore like a little brown bat
(Myotis lucifugus)
can eat in a single night. Estimates range from an insubstantial number to six hundred mosquitoes per hour (a number that always seemed a bit high to me).
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Copyright © 2008 by William A. Schutt Jr.
Illustrations copyright © 2008 by Patricia J. Wynne

All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Harmony Books, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
www.crownpublishing.com

Harmony Books is a registered trademark and the Harmony Books colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Schutt, Bill.

Dark banquet : blood and the curious lives of blood-feeding creatures / Bill Schutt; illustrated by Patricia J. Wynne.

                                    p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references.
1. Blood-feeding creatures. I. Title.
QL756.55.S38 2008

591.5'3—dc22                                                       2008003061

eISBN: 978-0-307-44992-4

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