Fig. 151. Raft of eggs, greatly enlarged.
Suppose we make it our business from now on to care about such things, and to inquire into the ways our plant and animal neighbors have of living and of getting a living. Are you quite sure that the mosquitoes have not spent their winter under your protection? If in April you had had occasion to frequent either garret or cellar there you might have found them. By dozens and scores they were waiting for the return of warm weather to free them. Many of them winter not as eggs, larvæ, or pupæ, but as winged adults, as mosquitoes. This rather interferes with the prevalent notion that mosquitoes live but for a day. Would that this were true, and might that day be short!
The Life History of the Mosquito.
Fig. 152. The larva or wiggler.
The life history of a mosquito is in four chapters, some of which are exceedingly short, others long. The length of each may be varied by the weather and the season. Moisture and warmth are particularly advantageous to the rapid development of these creatures. Ten days in hot weather may be sufficient time for the growth of a generation of them, from egg to adult. There are many generations in a year.
Fig. 153. The active pupa.
The larvæ of mosquitoes are aquatic. They live in stagnant water everywhere, in ponds, swamps, ditches, puddles, rain-water barrels, and horse-troughs. In early spring the female mosquito that has wintered in your garret will probably go to the nearest rain-water barrel or water-tank. She finds her way by instinct, before the sun is up. When you go to replenish your pitcher you will find a little flat cluster of eggs like a tiny raft floating on the surface ([Fig. 151]). It is dark-colored and the chances are you will not see it unless it gets into your pitcher. By two o'clock in the afternoon there may be from two to four hundred lively little wigglers in the water. Possibly they will wait until the following day. They all hatched from the eggs of one mosquito. They hitch and twitch about in the water, coming often to the surface and hanging there for a moment ([Fig. 152]). You call them "wigglers." But did you ever wonder why they wiggle, why they come so often to the surface, and why they thrust up the little tube which projects from near the end of the body? Did you ever ask what they find to eat in the water, and how they eat it?