We got terribly swarmed in a very remote area in Michigan’s upper peninsula while walking in the woods. My partner and I grabbed pine branches and started waving them around us while we ran back, but my dog kept thinking I was playing as I tried to wave them around her and would run off from me. Within 20 minutes of getting back, she was covered in massive lumps all over her body, her lips and ears were grossly swollen, and she started breathing really, really shallowly.
There were no open or emergency vets anywhere nearby, so we tried to give her some benadryl and water as best we could. Luckily, she was well-recovered by morning. But the danger posed by swarms of mosquitos became abundantly clear to me.
Nothing a nice fire wont fix
Instructions unclear, burned my dog
The real pro tip is always in the comments: bring your dog on a hike for impromptu bbq
TIL I have a new phobia
Would stop, drop, and roll not work?
not if I also have a phobia of sudden falls and the ground! 😬
ironically, I’m a pyromanic!
I think that just increases the number needed
This is so much better than quicksand.
The size of mosquitoes in rural Canada confirms this is possible. It could even require 4 of them to completely bleed a human dry.
In Finnish lapland we have mosquitoes so big that my friend takes them and dries them to make sauna stools.
God you are lucky in lapland. I have always wanted to do that, but the ones here in northern ostrobothnia dont fit trough the doors so we can use them only as patio furniture.
Sailors round these parts use the massive ancient mosquitos to navigate the ocean since they dont move in the sky
Tell me you’re from the ostrobothnia without telling me you’re from the ostrobothnia.
Yeah, we can cut steaks off them.
They generally don’t though, they prefer picking people up and dropping them from height on some sharp rocks, then feasting on the corpse.
Last year I had to take some parts to a pivot crew working in soybeans. I want to preface this that I used to farm and I’ve built fences next to river bottoms I’ve had to deal with some bad mosquitoes.
With that said I never have seen a mosquito outbreak like last summer fall. I took two steps into that field and was immediately covered. I have no idea how those builders could stand being out there.
I think, if they wanted to, those mosquitoes could have lifted me off the ground and flown me to their lair.
Especially in Manitoba, it is the provincial bird afterall
the large ones are called elephant mosquitoes totally harmless thier larva usually hunt actual mosquitoes in water.
Jesus. I’ve seen it in wild rabbits, but that makes sense because the ticks can get larger than their eyeballs. And that looks really bad, like their ears are more tick than ear. With the square cube rule the number of ticks to take down a moose scares me.
Lets be honest, anything that takes down moose is petrifying
Very interesting read, aside from the blood curdling close up of those patches of engorged ticks. Also…
At that stage, the bloodsucking arachnids are the size of a pencil tip.
That has to be one of the least precise measurements I’ve seen. Might as well say “as deep as a cup of water” or “as bright as a light”
It’s folksy knowledge, not your fancy booklearning.
Lee Kantar—moose biologist with the Maine “Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife—counts winter tick larvae, or nymphs, on a live moose calf in Maine.” - definitely not my type of job :(
Reporter has not read/watched One Punch Man 👊
I immediately thought of OPM when I saw this post
To here was a whole one punch man arc about this.
casually swats villain
This sounds like an excellent setup for a trashy horror-movie.
Oh boy, do i have a treat for you
I saw it. It’s basically as the article describes.
Im surprised this has not been used in a movie.
It happened in the One Punch Man anime. There is a movie called Mosquito, but they are giant sized instead of a swarm. Land of the Lost had a giant one that mostly drained what’s his name.
For movies they appear to have consistently gone with the giant mosquito approach.
Special mention: The spiders in Arachnophobia drained people completely despite being about wolf spider sized, which is smaller than a tarantula.
You’re telling me that tarantulas can be bigger than a wolf?
Bigger than a wolf sized spider?
No.
They also did it in Solar Opposites.
Since it takes quite a while, it’s not quite as cinematic as a swarm of bees.
yeah but that kinda makes it more horrific.
Sad that the option for “Sucked To Death” in the title was not used
What an itchy way to go
I imagine it’s more of a burning sensation. Like death by a thousand cuts
technically it isnt bleeding, but sucking the animal dry of blood.
You don’t hear bleed used as a transitive verb (with an object) as much anymore with actual blood since they stopped using leeches in medicine, but it’s still commonly used for other situations. You can bleed fluid from a hydraulic line, for example.
Finally, a job for Will Smith!
