What Are the Effect of Mosquitoes in Humans Life?

Video Transcript

"The Summer after my freshman year in college I went to marine biology camp out on Assateague Island in Virginia. Oh I loved it. I had a fabulous time but within the first 24 hours that I was there I was covered in mosquito bites, head to toe. I looked like one giant bite kind of connected together by a little bit of skin. I'm Janice Creneti and I am here to talk to you about what are the effects of mosquitoes in human life. I have been teaching people about the environment for over 20 years which means I have spent a lot of time out there and I can tell you that mosquitoes can have some negative effects but at the end of the clip we are also going to talk about some of the reasons that we actually need to have them around but let's start with some of the things that you may be more familiar with, the negative effects on mosquitoes on human life. Well number one, they're kind of annoying. See the female mosquitoes are actually parasitic. They will fly in and get a blood meal which they need to actually raise their eggs and their eggs be strong and healthy and that can cause itching and irritation. It can also cause the spread of disease. Mosquitoes are considered to be vectors which means they carry disease causing organisms like little tiny single celled animals that when they bite into your skin those animals get injected into your bloodstream and they can cause diseases like malaria, Yellow Fever, and the one we have seen more recently in the United States, the West Nile Virus which is actually a virus that is transmitted through their bites. So those are some of the definitely negative effects of having mosquitoes in the ecosystem but as somebody who is trained in ecology I always try to look at the other side of the coin which is why do we actually need to have mosquitoes? I think that every year that I talk about animals and the environment and the importance of every species in the environment I have one student raise their hand and ask but we surely don't need mosquitoes. Well actually we do. You see insects are a very very important part of the food web in just about every single ecosystem that is out there. Mosquito larva are an important source of food for aquatic animals like fish and even dragon fly larva. Well adult mosquitoes are fed on by birds and bats so if we were to eliminate them completely from the ecosystem, the ecosystem would fall apart so we have to put up with some of the negative effects to benefit from the positive effects. I'm Janice Creneti and this is how do mosquitoes effect human life?"