I associate tiny mosquitos with bloodsucking pests, and large mosquitos with being annoying flying things. ISTM the small ones, about 5 mm size, are the ones that bite; and the large ones, a couple of inches, are the ones that fly around and bump into things.
I know that not all species don’t eat blood. Are the large ones non-bloodsuckers? Or have I just never been bitten by one? What can you tell me about them?
This is me, desperately fighting the temptation to spin an amusing (to me anyway) yarn.
The big ones are crane flys (aka: mosquito hawks). Their larvae wreck your yard, the adults do not, as their colloquial name suggests, wreck mosquitos.
Ignorance fought!
Thanks.
Did I really pluralize Fly as “flys?” It’s “flies,” right? In any event, having grown up in mossland I agree with your assessment of the bugs. Mosquitos are a drag, mosquito hawks are just, “WTF, really? Are you fuggin blind or have you just bounced into too many walls?”
Heh my 6 year old son saw a crane fly and ran screaming - he thought it was the world’s biggest mosquito. 
I was terrified when Papaplant took me fishing on lake Conway and Crane Flies infested wet stumps.
One of my favorite CP pictures.
Was that crane flies, or could they have been mayflies? I was camping at Lake Texoma a bunch of years ago and when I woke up, a hatch of mayflies had happened overnight. Every leaf of every tree and bush had multiple mayflies on it. The first couple of feet of water past the shore was a mat of dead mayflies. It was Hitchcock-esque.
Crane flies, that resemble mosquitoes enough to scare the snot out of me at five or six.
Crane flies never scared me because our cat loved to hunt and eat any one of them that ended up in the house.
You can identify a mosquito by its genus pretty easily. Huge black ones with fuzzy hunchbacks are Anophelese. Mid sized ones that have their whole bodies oriented toward biting you, that’s Aedes. They spread West Nile here in the US. Tiny ones with bent backs that bite at night are Culex. They spread SLE and Dengue fever.
There’s been a huge West Nile Virus outbreak here in southeast Texas this year. We’ve had our normal rainy summer after last year’s drought and people are getting sick. I had West Nile a few years ago and recovered after three days of sweating while feeling chilled and being unable to eat. West Nile can be serious. I know a guy who went into a coma from West Nile and who has had to learn to walk again.
Wrong. On all counts.
There are over 40 different genera of mosquitoes, and almost 4,000 species.
Not all Anopheles are dark. Not all are black. They can be large or small. They certainly are not fuzzy (at least not without a microscope). The orientation of a mosquito depends on many things. Culex do not transmit Dengue virus (Only a handful of Aedes species do). Many Culex do not bite at night (most are crepuscular feeders).
Crane flies are harmless. They don’t bite.
Cites: myself, a PhD medical entomologist, who has researched mosquitoes for almost 15 years.
Speaking as someone who regularly spends time in scandinavia during the summer, I thank you for your sacrifice. I can’t even imagine life without DEET, Octenol, allethrin and whatnot.
The local bears, wolves and whatnot don’t faze me in the least but even with 21st technology the mosquitoes sometimes make me feel like a persecuted victim of a malevolent mother nature. And as for the midges… :eek:
Try our cottage in northern Quebec. In early June. 
True story: one day my wife and I were sitting on our screened porch as the sun went down. I should mention our cottage is very remote on a large lake, so a boat passing by is a reasonably rare event. Anyway, I hear what sounds like a motorboat pulling into our dock - a low, but very loud, roar or vibration. I say “who on earth could that be?” and shine a flashlight out of the screen … only to see that the noise wasn’t a boat at all.
It was mosquitos. Thousands, perhaps millions of them. The screen was black with them. You could not see out. The roar was their humming - it grew louder and louder as the darkness increased. The whole porch was vibrating with their drone.
We used the chamber pot that night rather than open the door to go to the outhouse …
I was wondering what was flying around the house the other night. Looked just like the picture.Thanks.
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Heh. Assuming your place is in the peninsula bit at the top , our houses are at about the same latitude.
There is a national park in Northern Sweden where they have measured densities of 1300 mosquitoes per cubic metre of air during the peak season. I’m never going there unless there is frost in the mornings. I think that sort of thing is par for the course all through the arctic :eek:
