Showerthoughts
A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. The most popular seem to be lighthearted clever little truths, hidden in daily life.
Here are some examples to inspire your own showerthoughts:
- Both “200” and “160” are 2 minutes in microwave math
- When you’re a kid, you don’t realize you’re also watching your mom and dad grow up.
- More dreams have been destroyed by alarm clocks than anything else
Rules
- All posts must be showerthoughts
- The entire showerthought must be in the title
- No politics
- If your topic is in a grey area, please phrase it to emphasize the fascinating aspects, not the dramatic aspects. You can do this by avoiding overly politicized terms such as "capitalism" and "communism". If you must make comparisons, you can say something is different without saying something is better/worse.
- A good place for politics is c/politicaldiscussion
- Posts must be original/unique
- Adhere to Lemmy's Code of Conduct and the TOS
If you made it this far, showerthoughts is accepting new mods. This community is generally tame so its not a lot of work, but having a few more mods would help reports get addressed a little sooner.
Whats it like to be a mod? Reports just show up as messages in your Lemmy inbox, and if a different mod has already addressed the report, the message goes away and you never worry about it.
Female mosquitos (male ones don't bite) inject their saliva in order to get as much blood out as quickly as possible. The saliva contains an anticoagulant to prevent clotting. Most people are allergic to some proteins in mosquito saliva, which triggers the immune system to send in histamines. One of the things those histamines do is to dilate blood vessels, allowing for white blood cells to get to the area more quickly. Dilated blood vessels help the mosquito to get more blood.
So there might be a benefit to mosquitos from their bites causing that itching, because of the dilated blood vessels that come first.
I understand the saliva has a benefit for mosquitoes, but not the swelling and the itching (the "unpleasantness" in the title). In essence, our bodies hung this not-otherwise-useful allergic response on something the mosquitoes couldn't/wouldn't/didn't give up and which was firmly specific to their bites, to single them out.
If there was no saliva our bodies would be pressured by natural selection to pick some other mechanism to make their bites unpleasant. An allergy to their chitin or a phobia to the sound of their wings, etc.
Evolutionary pressure from mosquitoes has probably been no small thing.
I don't get itchy from mosquito bites. 🤔
Witch.
Someone on Lemmy theorized that I simply have a shit immune system. ~~Witch~~ Which may be accurate.
I read that if you see a mosquito biting you and you can resist the urge to swat her until she's done, you'll have less itch because she'll have sucked most of her saliva back out with the blood. But I haven't tried it
That would mean when they bite you during the night when they can take their sweet time, you would wake up with no itchiness, but that's not the case for me.
Maybe the nighttime suckers are kinky bastards who deliberately hock a loogie in you before they leave.
The huck tuah mozzies
Actually what you've got to do is pinch the skin around it, trapping its mouthparts, and violently blasting blood inside it until it's too fat to fly.
Nothing a little heat doesn't solve. If you dont have a heat wand for moz bites, you are missing out.
I disagree because the reaction to a mosquito bite is an after effect of being bitten. By the time you realize you’ve been bitten, it’s too late. Any damage is already done. It’s also difficult to see mosquitoes, as they are small. Similar to ticks, they do not usually trigger a sensation that you would feel. The best you could hope for is to recognize and correlate the itchiness with the locations you visit, and learn to stay away from that area at certain times.
Hey, you kind of figured it out by the end. The people that stay away from those areas to prevent being bitten will also avoid disease whether that was their intention or not
I was rooting for them the whole way.
I disagree. I live in mosquito land and get bitten a lot. I'd say the majority of mosquitos biting me, I feel when they land, before they bite. Probably half of those I can either slap or miss and they take off again and try again. There are some spots though where I don't feel them land. The annoying ones are those I feel touching me but they don't land, they just fly around. Those are hard to slap.
Unrelated question: does anybody happen to know if the biting time matters for transmitting disease?
2 mosquitos died on me while typing out this comment.
Maybe my mosquitos are different than yours (just looked, and there are 3600 different kinds). Usually when I take my dog out so she can “commune with nature”, I’ll end up getting bit two or three times by mosquitos. I never feel them at all, except for the itchy bumps after the fact. Could be me. I only ever get bit on my legs/ankles.
As for bite time, I don’t think it’s the length of time the mosquito feeds, but the act of breaking skin and feeding. The malaria parasite will cause the mosquito to bite over and over again, which probably increases the infection rate.
Maybe they are different. I live in Asia. From what I heard there are many mosquito species, but the majority not blood sucking or at least not human blood sucking. Only few species carry disease, if I recall correctly.
To be fair, when I'm preoccupied, I also don't feel them always. Or I feel them but my hands are busy, so I can't slap them. I often have this at night, when I'm playing PC games and my feet get stung up. It'll be like "ouch, my foot! Gotta slap that mosquito, but first I finish this in game. And then this." Procrastinating until it's too late.
I believe ankles are prime for them due to thin skin.
One mosquito died, writing this comment.
You need a net. Or some kinda natural deterrent.
I haven’t tried it myself, but I’ve heard coffee grounds are a good mosquito repellent. If you have access to essential oils, you should also look into citronella oil too.
Keep up the good fight!
I use mosquito coils, they are very effective.
I also have an electric bat, although it's more for the phycho fun of killing than helping reducing bites. They are just too many.
I tried lemongrass as a natural deterrent but had the impression it made no difference.
What works best for me is: slapping those you can while not caring about the rest. Because once you start to scratch it's a vicious cycle, so I don't touch stings and usually then forget about them shortly after.
That site is cancer lol.
It isn't wrong, but holy crap is it badly done
Mosquito land? Sounds awful! Where is it? So I can avoid it, of course.
I literally swatted a mosquito the other day because it bit me while I was doing something else. I didn't feel it land, but I did feel the bite which triggered me to slap it out of existence.
...motivates us to avoid being bitten...
nobody ever went "well let's get bitten by this other species and see what's up" lol I think all types of bites are avoided as a standard, you don't need to be movitated to it
Yeah but if it wasn't itchy most mosquito bites would just go unnoticed
My grandpa didn't mind the bites. He would chill in the garden with 5 or more of the fuckers on him and let them have at it, conciously.
Coyote Peterson