I became well acquainted with mosquito bites and their impact while writing about malaria and dengue fever in Costa Rica, where I grew up and worked as a health reporter. Then I produced Deep Look’s episode about mosquitoes’ complex mouthparts and got a close-up look at them. Surprisingly, while I made that video and subsequent Deep Look episodes about ticks, lice, kissing bugs and tsetse flies, I wasn’t grossed out. Instead, I felt empowered and motivated to teach people about these pests, even letting some of them bite me in order to film their special anatomy (always in such a way that I wasn’t risking my health). The more I learned, the better prepared I felt to keep them away. I hope you have the same feeling after you’ve watched our videos, which we’ve compiled into a single episode. So, skip the leftover Halloween candy and focus on the gore instead!
Chances are you’ve got one of these bloodsuckers lurking nearby. Mosquitoes, ticks, lice, kissing bugs and tsetse flies are all looking to grab a bite ... of you. See *exactly* how they do it and what you can do to stop them.
Meet nature’s deadliest animal — the mosquito! It uses not one but six needlelike mouthparts to saw into your skin and tap a blood vessel. See its and four more creatures’ sophisticated tools at work.
KQED SCIENCE 12 Bay Area Hikes For Escaping the Election (Even For a Few Hours) With Election Day coming up, you might be looking for a way to unwind. Here are some suitably calming hikes in the Bay Area, as recommended by Bay Area outdoor advocates and KQED staff.
THE CALIFORNIA REPORT MAGAZINE Great Redwood Trail Proposal Unearths Painful History for Indigenous Tribes The proposal would transform an old rail system into a 300-mile trail, opening vast sections of the Eel River to the public. But for the Indigenous people who were forcibly displaced, prioritizing the public over tribal access resurfaces old wounds.
🦟Mosquitoes transmit diseases that can have serious health consequences, like Zika, and can even be deadly, such as dengue, West Nile, yellow fever and malaria. Malaria alone killed more than 600,000 people in 2022.
⚓Ticks have a mouth covered in hooks. Those hooks act like mini-harpoons, anchoring the tick to their victim’s skin for the long haul. This is why you can never just flick a tick off of you or your dog.
🦠To pull out a tick, place a pair of tweezers close to the skin and just pull straight out. What's most important is to pull the tick's body out as soon as possible to prevent bacteria from flowing out of the tick and into you. If a bit of its mouthpart stays behind, don't worry. Just clean the area with alcohol.
🥚Head lice have special claws called tarsal claws – one on each leg – that fit perfectly around a strand of human hair. The lice glue their eggs to individual strands of hair, close to the scalp, and feed on human blood several times a day.
💋A kissing bug can ingest 12 times its weight in human blood. Once it has fed, it poops. If the bug’s victim rubs this feces and urine into the bite wound or their eyes, they can become infected with the parasite that causes Chagas disease.
😴Tsetse flies, which are only found in Africa, feed exclusively on the blood of humans and other domestic and wild animals. As they feed, they can transmit microscopic parasites called trypanosomes, which cause a disease known as sleeping sickness in humans and nagana in cattle and other livestock.
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Name That Critter
This parasite loves to suck your blood when you are off in dreamland. It doesn’t fly or jump or come in from the garden. Instead, it crawls very quickly and hides in travelers’ luggage and secondhand furniture. Or it moves from apartment to apartment. Find the answer at the bottom of this newsletter.
EVENT
Envisioning a healthy ocean for all: ‘What does it look like if we get it right?’
Deep Look Producer Rosa Tuirán (far right) moderates a conversation with some of the world’s leading experts in ocean health and sustainability. The event’s panelists, left to right, are Julie Packard, executive director of the Monterey Bay Aquarium; Fiorenza Micheli, chair of the oceans department at Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability; and Julie Bert, director of SRI’s Hardware Research and Technology Lab. The event was held at SRI’s PARC Campus in Palo Alto, California on Tuesday, Oct. 15. If you missed attending, enjoy reading Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability's article about the event.
For Gabriela’s episode about how mosquitoes use six needles to suck our blood, she attempted to get bitten by a mosquito, so that the bite could be filmed. No mosquitoes bit her, though. The video features mosquitoes digging into several scientists instead. This is Deep Look’s most watched video, with over 23 million views, and it also won a People’s Voice Webby Award.
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We hope you enjoyed this week’s newsletter. Thank you for your support! Until next week!
- The Deep Look Team and Science Teams
Deep Look is KQED’s award-winning wildlife video series that reveals the tiny dramas playing out in the natural world. We’re a member-supported YouTube series from KQED and PBS Digital Studios. Learn more.
KQED’s award-winning science coverage brings you the latest climate, environment and health news from the Bay Area and beyond. KQED Science is supported in part by the members of KQED. Learn more.
Bed bug! At night, this parasite crawls onto your bed, bites you and sucks your blood. Then it finds a nearby hideout where it leaves disgusting telltale signs. But this pest has an Achilles’ heel that stops it cold.
