Photo of a herbivorous mosquito!

[Cheb]

My friend timewind has friends who luckily always have a pro-quality camera on themselves.
So when mosquito attacked the melon they were eating and began sucking up its juice... Well, the photo is on this page:

http://timewind.livejournal.com/269826.html
or
http://babelfish.yahoo.com/translate_ur ... =Translate

[Daniel Jess Gibson]

Mosquitos are vegetarian, they feed on nectar. The females suck blood to reproduce.

[Cheb]

Then why this one, clearly a sanguivorous female, sucked juice from melon?
On the other hand, who ever debugged the mosquito targeting algorithms? It could have been a rare bug that didn't get ironed out by evolution because it hardly affects the overall survival rate.

Or was I wrong? I thought, the mosquito males are several times smaller so people usually don't even think of them as of mosquitoes.

[Dumbledork]

No, the male mosquitoes are much larger than the female. At least the ones we have over here.

[Spokavriel]

I got bitten by a male mosquito once I think it did it out of panic because I was trying to shoo it away. It itched at least 20 times worse than usual female bites.

[Kadunta]

Just to drive in the point of Daniel Jess Gibson:

Also female mosquitos feed on nectar/fruit juices; I recall seeing a TV documentary (late '80s or early '90s) where they showed how mosquitos have two 'stomaches', one for nectar/fruit juice and one for blood. The mosquito they had recorded had just drunk some nectar/fruit juice and then some blood, which showed the two stomaches pretty clearly with light passing through the insect. However, as I tried to look for a good photo of this, I couldn't find any site to corroborate my memory whether this was true or not (the part of two stomaches, that is; I found other sites that say also female mosquitos drink nectar and fruit juices).

A possibly relevant question+answer from Yahoo! Answers; believe if you want.

Edit: I'm now pretty certain that TV documentary was wrong about the two stomaches; I still haven't found any information to support the claim.

[Cheb]

Wow You never know...

[CRBWildcat]

Personally, the only thing I find fascinating about the mosquito is what it looks like after it's been swatted.

[Dumbledork]

Personally, the only thing I find fascinating about the mosquito is what it looks like after it's been swatted.

I don't. Because then I have to clean up. And I hate spiders even more than mosqutoes. I love to to see those beasties disappear inside the vacuum cleaner.

[CRBWildcat]

To each his own, I suppose.