Essay Example on First stage are the eggs which are laid by female Mosquitoes

The first stage are the eggs which are laid by female mosquitos in a moist place such as puddles or the inside of an old tire where condensation is found The eggs of Culex are laid by the female mosquitos in batches of 50 to 100 in tiny clumps that are around a quarter inch long and tend to float together on the surface of the water The eggs that are white in the beginning turn to a near black within a day Most of the times they hatch in one to three days however it usually depends on the temperature Once the eggs hatch the mosquito larvae comes out The larvae are the baby stage of mosquitos The larvae are aquatic creatures that feed on algae bacteria and other microorganisms in the water Most of their time is spent hanging upside down from the surface while sucking in oxygen from the breathing tubes that are located in their tails The New South Wales Department of Natural Resources in Australia describes them as hairy maggots with siphon covered on the lower half by a cocoon Since mosquitos are cold blooded they depend on external heat sources to warm their bodies due to which the temperature plays an important role in their development The mosquito larvae grow faster if the temperature is warmer It takes about a week for most of the larvae to develop as they shed their skin four times to become mosquito pupae The mosquito pupae do not feed at all They tend to swim around in the water The mosquito pupae have short curved bodies with a large head at one end and flippers for swimming at the other 

They live at the surface due to their light weight and just like the larvae mosquito pupae have to take in oxygen from time to time through two breathing tubes It takes approximately four days for the pupae to develop into an adult mosquito inside the cocoon again depending on the temperature of the water Once the pupal tissue develops into an adult mosquito the adult uses the air pressure to split the cocoon and emerge Usually the new mosquitos tend to rest on the surface to let their wings dry out and their bodies harden Adult mosquitos have a head with two large compound eyes a thorax a pair of scaled wings and six jointed legs They have two things in mind when they come out of their cocoons feed and mate If they are successful in doing both there are more mosquitos to bother us Now that we know about the life cycle of mosquitoes Another question that might arise in one's mind is how have mosquitoes evolved to suck on human blood To answer this question let's look at the Unique mosquito that lives in the London Underground There are mosquitos that live in the underground as they have evolved to live in the unique conditions of the tube environment Over the course of the war almost 180 000 people sheltered in the Underground People sheltering in the Underground were pestered by all sorts of insects such as flies ticks lice and fleas as they were very common during that time 

The London Underground mosquito is a genetically distinct subspecies Katharine Byrne a London based doctoral student collected mosquitoes from seven sites across the 180km network Her results showed that these mosquitos were essentially different from the mosquitos that lived above ground The very common species of mosquito Culex pipiens that lived above ground only bit birds however the Culex pipiens molestus tend to feed on human blood The Culex is a very common mosquito says biologist Bruno Gomes from the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine There are hundreds or thousands of types of them and they re not very harmful Along with having different diets the two species have different behaviours as well Culex pipiens the above ground mosquito need blood to lay their eggs hibernate in the winter and need a lot of space to mate On the other hand Culex pipiens molestus does not require any of these There only similarity being their looks The differences were caused by the different lifestyles that both species are exposed to The underground species adapted to their underground life where there were no birds to feed on so they fed on mammals that would be present in the Underground mostly rats and humans they had to mate in closed areas unlike there above ground relatives because there were no open spaces in the Underground and lastly they lost their tendency to hibernate as the Underground does not have different seasons This is a direct representation of allopatric speciation as there was a physical barrier that separated them After the London Underground system s construction the tunnels were largely sealed off from the surface and some of the mosquitos found themselves trapped underground It created two different populations that are no longer able to interbreed due to the differences in their mating behavior The above ground mosquitos tend to form big swarm to pair with their mating partner however the underground mosquitos tend to choose their mates individually Although some may argue that the Culex pipiens molestus are their own species The genetic makeup of Culex pipiens is so closely related that it is near impossible not to say that the one species evolved from the other