Name: What If Mosquitoes Were the Size of Humans?
Uploaded: 2020-04-04T08:12:14.000Z
Duration: 5 min 46 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

you can be bitten by 175 different types.

One of the reasons this disease-carrying bug

Like vampires, mosquitoes are known for  blood-sucking.

mosquitoes need sugar from nectar to survive.

Female mosquitoes need a particular protein

during their average lifespan of 2 to 6 weeks.

This is why only female mosquitoes  bite and draw blood.

So what would happen if they were  the size of humans?

For starters, transmitting diseases  would be the last thing you'd worry about.

If a female mosquito were 79 kg (175 lbs)

and still required almost three times her

body weight in blood over her life cycle,

then she would need 237 kg (525 lbs) of animal blood

she would need to suck every last drop  of blood from your body.

it could become difficult for female  mosquitoes

to get enough blood to lay her maximum  amount of eggs,

so the population might begin to  decrease quickly.

And we'd probably want to kill  as many as possible.

of pesticide that only harmed mosquitoes and not humans.

would begin to eat mosquito eggs and larvae,

This period of transition would be a vulnerable

time and could make killing them much easier.

Human-sized mosquitoes would be bad news,

and not just because they could easily kill us.

creating chaos in both the meat industry  and nature.

But would a mosquito even be able to survive  at 79 kg (175 lbs) in our current atmosphere?

the amount of oxygen in the air limits  their growth.

But today, the oxygen in our atmosphere is only 21%.

That's not enough for a human-sized mosquito.

stronger exoskeleton to support all  that extra weight.

We might not see human-sized  mosquitoes any time soon,

but we could see a rise in giant  mosquitoes called 'Gallinippers'.

than their cousins and are native to  North America.

They are so large, they are able to  bite through clothing!

they need temperatures over 26 °C (78.8 °F).

Gallinippers could easily expand their  range and population.

Another possibility is that the growth  of mosquitoes

could also spur the growth of their  natural predators.

Just imagine giant spiders roaming the Earth.