Mosquitoes are not one of my favourite bugs. In fact I detest them. Bloodsuckers ! Parasites !! - as Captain Haddock would have put it mildly. We humans toil to manufacture all the oxygen rich blood through many processes which involves breaking complex foods by our bodies. And here comes this puny little twerp who, on the other hand, easily gets to have his dinner due to an efficient evolutionary radar meant for human sweat and Carbon Dioxide.
Having said that, the mosquito also sometimes behaves like us humans. Interested to know more about this. Read on...
As we all know ''inquisitiveness'' is one of the things that made the human beings different from other living organisms. We got out of the sea....climbed trees...stood erect...domesticated animals and stuff like that. It also made us grow intellectually. This is not referring to the kind of education we have forced on ourselves and I'm not going down that path. What I mean is that the simple mosquito is just as inquisitive.
The Mumbai seashore, where I live, is mostly covered by mangroves which has rich flora and fauna as well as a variety of mosquitos. It houses nearly all kinds...like the ones in Siliguri, West Bengal or Bharuch, Gujarat or Alleppey, Kerela. I mention these places because I remember the mosquitoes these places have. Really terrible ones. They have somehow migrated to Mumbai (just like us humans and the pink flamingos that visit Mumbai).
Well, if we follow these multicultural and cosmopolitan mosquitoes in the late evenings, they tend to look around for a good place for dinner. Open windows on any floor are preferred (including mine which happens to be on the 10th floor). I figured out how they manage that but that is another story. The invaders will try all possible ways to sneak in even if the windows are closed. The strange behaviour that I've observed about this is that once they are in, and when the ambient light reduces, they want to go back out and stick to the windows from the inside.
This behaviour of mosquitoes showing their unsatisfied nature even when they got what they wanted always intrigued me till I realised a familiar behaviour exhibited by us humans all the time. We try hard to acquire things and when we get it, we go on in pursuit of still other desirable things. This cycle of wants and needs keeps us unsatisfied which pushes us to grow in more ways than one.
The similarity does not end here. As indicated earlier, there are a variety of mosquitoes from different regions...the steady ones, small ones, the fat ones, ones who can't move after eating, the clever ones, ones you can hear but can't see, ones that carry the deadly viruses, ones that are fatal, ones who circle on your head driving you crazy, ones who just want your blood (they'll stop for nothing and try to keep poking even through your jeans), ones that get stuck inside your mosquito net, ones that attack your legs under the table, etc etc. Sounds familiar. Welcome ! You are now officially a member of the unsatisfied human blood suckers awareness club.
