MAN AS FOOD FOR ANIMALS 37 



are enveloped in a mist of mosquitoes which trails out several 

 feet behind, and your horse is almost hidden by them. I 

 have never seen the equal of this swamp, at least as it was 

 twenty years ago, but I have not the slightest doubt that there 

 are many other places just as bad or even worse, in the north 

 as well as in the tropics. In Alaska they sometimes drive 

 the bears and deer into the water. 



Though most are dull, some tropical mosquitoes are very 

 brilliant in their coloring, burnished copper or iridescent 

 green. In the mountains of St. Vincent I well remember a 

 brilliant green mosquito that used to hunt me when I was 

 hunting parrots. 



The different species of mosquitoes vary greatly in their 

 habits. When young most of them eat dead organic matter, 

 some eat small microscopic creatures, while a few have pre- 

 daceous habits. As adults a few feed entirely on the juice of 

 plants while most of them will do so if they cannot get blood. 

 I have seen numbers of them feeding on bananas. Male mos- 

 quitoes never bite. The females of some species will attack a 

 large variety of vertebrates, including even turtles, while others 

 are more particular, a few specializing to a large extent on 

 man. One of our commonest mosquitoes in the eastern United 

 States never bites man, but feeds on the blood of frogs and 

 perhaps also on some other cold blooded animals. 



As is now well and generally known the mosquitoes in 

 the warmer regions are especially to be dreaded as carriers 

 of disease; malaria, yellow fever, dengue and filariasis are 

 spread by them, the causative organisms being injected while 

 they bite. Mosquitoes also serve as disseminators of the 

 human bot-fly. 



In Africa the tsetse flies are easily first among the insect 

 pests as the carriers of sleeping sickness and other trypano- 

 some diseases. These flies resemble the bird flies in having 

 no feeding larval stage, but feeding only as adults, as well as 

 in being wholly parasitic on the vertebrates. As in many, if 

 not most, bird flies the young are born full grown and ready 



