Frazz by Jef Mallett for July 24, 2022

In Vietnam we had to take a malaria pill once week, and it would often give us diarrhea for two or three days. It did help if you broke it into a couple of pieces and took one a day.

I don’t care what you say, I still am the Apex predator

“Yea, tho I walk thru the Valley of Death, I shall fear no evil, for I am the meanest son of a bïtch in the valley.”

You probably are eating some of the mosquitos.

I’m the person that my friends and kin want to come with them on hikes because I attract ALL the mosquitoes. Thus, I have done some research. Turns out that they are attracted to white shirts. I now wear black tees. Doesn’t help. Turns out they’re attracted to your exhaled CO₂ that kind of clings around you after you exhale. Great. Now all I have to do is hold my breath for a couple of hours. While hiking. Spouse swears that Skin-so-Soft works to keep them away from her. Nothing when I use it. Deet DOES work, but seems to kill them only AFTER they’ve had a taste. (sighs)

Do the mosquitoes consider this to be biting satire ?

Mosquitoes are responsible for the deaths of more people than any other animal other than other people. They are also a species that don’t fill a vital ecological niche, meaning if they were all to disappear, nothing would be lost.

this ticked me off

I’m so glad there aren’t any mosquitoes where I live. Or any that I’ve heard about.

They don’t actually eat the blood. They save it for the blood ritual that is the mosquito’s reproductive process.

Frazz is right about the fogging. It kills mosquitoes, but it also kills or injures most other species for which insects are part of their food chain. Lots of reports on that. It also carries chemical mixes that can injure humans.

My neighbor has fogging done almost monthly here in central VA, but she rarely ever uses the deck or sits outside. Wanted to suggest to her that her main source of mosquitos was the back half of her yard where they have been piling their leaves for over 20 years. Water pools, low growth plants, mold. Perfect spots for incubating the little biters.

Last week I caught the fogger hitting the wax leaf plants in our side yard. That’s where birds nest and raise their young. He said he was only spraying the foot long limbs that hang over the fence. Impossible, of course. Cut him off from doing that again in very clear terms.

Frazz, about yesterday’s discussion with Jane, now is an excellent time to go inside and clean out that refrigerator!

I keep reading that bug-zappers don’t work on mosquitoes. They zap stuff continually, but the mosquitoes ignore them. So I’ve read.

Ah, San Diego.

Badger Balm stick form works great for me, and its not messy. I hike right through them and they ignore me.

My wife and daughter’s idea of roughing it is waiting 30 minutes for room service, not spending an afternoon fighting off a jagdstaffel of hungry mosquitos. On the other hand, I can see why the RAF named that WWII aircraft “Mosquito.”

“If your idea of high-quality entertainment is a six-pack of beer and a bug zapper …

You might be a redneck."

— Jeff Foxworthy

One method I’ve heard of is to hang cloth bags of dry ice around an area. The dry ice will give off lots of carbon dioxide so the mosquitos will go after them instead. Don’t do this in a small airtight space because enough carbon dioxide can kill humans too.

I’ve read recently that successfully killing all mosquitos would damage the Earth’s ecosystem because mosquitos are significant pollinators, but they are so annoying that the arguments for keeping them don’t seem very compelling to me.

Bug Zappers won’t work on female mosquitoes, but it does on helpful insects. Females key off of carbon-dioxide out gassing. They normally feed on flower nectar but during the egg season they need something from mammalian blood, so that is why they attack. Also the various diseases they catch are accidents.