Shit Girl, They Sure Are

Shit girl, they sure are

Good news y’all I’m wet as fuuuck

is this anything

romance me with mosquito facts

mosquitoes, when in a condensed enough space, sound like gentle rain.

i work with a specific mosquito species, called the aedes agypti, which carries diseases like dengue virus, west niles virus, and yellow fever. the males are generally smaller than the females, though emerge into adults sooner. you can tell the difference between males and females by the fluffy antennas of the males.

gay mosquitoes everywhere.

mosquitoes tend to be social, if stupid creatures. if you stick two mosquitoes alone in a cage, they probably wont chill (and wont mate). it's just not their style. this is especially frustrating when trying to set up specific genetic crosses.

although i never met them, there used to be a researcher at the lab who did the most batshit stuff. we keep our mosquitoes in mesh cages, so they can't escape but they can feed through the mesh (so we don't have to reach in and out of the cages and potentially let some loose). this old researcher used to grab the morning newspaper, roll up his pants, collapse in a chair and settle his calves over the mesh cages for literal thousands of mosquitoes to feed from him. for hours. i want to meet this man so bad.

mosquitoes are stupid and annoying and prone to killing themselves akin to a goldfish constantly getting stuck in a filter. but strangely enough, you grow to love them. they are simultaneously fragile and durable, easily discernible and difficult to hunt. you can tear their hind legs off and put them through shock a few times and they'll be fine, but a single finger will smush them (quite inconveniently, when you know that bitch could've moved!).

directly after bloodfeeding a female mosquito, if you kill her—often by clapping her directly between your hands (female mosquitoes are the only ones to bloodfeed)—the blood will still be warm.

although i dont screen larvae for traits as often as I used to (I tend to do more database/mosquito caretaking work now), certain gene-linked traits can be found physically in the larvae and pupae stages—sometimes they glow bright blue/green under fluorescent lighting, for example.

like I said though, i mostly work with caretaking. i do the bloodfeeding, i replace their food and water, and i make sure they're in good health and can lay eggs on a proper surface. the mosquitoes under my care live for about a month and a half, though if they're still alive by the time we need to hatch the next generation, we simply fridge them and kill them off. put mosquitoes in the fridge for a few minutes and they'll go to sleep. put them in for a few hours, and they'll usually die— we keep them in for 24 hours to make sure, though.

mosquitoes are difficult to contain. compared to other biochemistry departments, you have tiny creatures that are mobile and can fly, and can't always be seen by the average person unless they're specifically looking for it. I've worked in microbiology labs before, but if there was contamination, it was solely on the researcher. contamination from a loose mosquito is hard to track. this is all to say that I work in a bunker—double doors, minimal vents, no windows.

mosquitoes are the deadliest animals in the world. mosquitoes kill over a million people a year (hence my research). i sit in the back of the bunker sometimes, in the side warm room where we keep our cages of mosquitoes, hundreds of different genetically modified lines in progress at a time, and I have blood on my palms— blood that I fed to my subjects before I squashed them because they escaped from their cages, and I think about the fact that for over 200 lines of this species, I grow them from eggs to adults to death and hatch their offspring again and again and again. i think of lovecraftian horror and I hear gentle rain and remember images of war that keep me up late at night, and I wonder what's the point, for a few numbers in my bank account, and then another mosquito has gotten loose and lands on my arm and doesn't bite me, because it's already full; because i already fed it; because it's just looking for a small, dark place to rest in the folds of my jacket.

mosquitoes love to hide on black surfaces.

Colored a minigram!

Translation credit: thinkin-bout-milgram

Jackalope sits on it like a cat while it slowly moves through the prison

talked to my bestie about milgram smart microwave/fridge, and she went ‘whats next, milgram smart vacuum??’ and the look i gave her when she said that

Today in niche genres of joke that I can never get enough of and will probably still be secretly thinking about four years later