Tufted mosquitoes
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Chaoborus crystallinus |
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| Chaoboridae | ||||||||||||
| Edwards , 1912 | ||||||||||||
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The tufted mosquitoes (Chaoboridae) are a family of the two-winged (Diptera) and belong to the mosquitoes (Nematocera).
features
In contrast to the related mosquitoes , the tufted mosquitoes do not suck blood. Chaoborus crystallinus , for example, is a European species with wings folded flat on its back and a humped shape. The wings of the females reach to the tip of the abdomen, while this is not the case with the males. The antennae of the males are highly pinnate, so they look superficially similar to those of the mosquito and are often confused, but tufted mosquitoes have around 10 wing veins that reach the edge, while there are fewer in mosquitoes (6–8). If you take a closer look at the wing veins, it is more like that of mosquitoes, and a comparison reveals differences to mosquitoes:
| Tufted mosquitoes | Mosquitoes | Mosquitoes |
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Proboscis |
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The adult animals stay near the water.
Larval development
The larvae of the tufted mosquito are known as "glass rod larvae". They are transparent and stand horizontally in the water. Unlike mosquitoes (Culicidae), for example , they have no respiratory organs on their abdomen, instead they breathe through their body surface. They are held in suspension by paired tracheal bladders in the thorax and in the seventh abdominal segment. By varying the content, the animals can rise or fall in the water. They also move through jerky movements of the entire body.
Chaoborus larvae predatorily live on zooplankton , especially daphnia . The prey capture is evidently stimulated by vibrations of the prey when they get to the sensitive antennae of the larvae. The antennae are also used to catch the prey and these are used to push the victim between the mandibles .
Chaoborus larvae, like other zooplankton species, make a daily vertical migration . During the day, the older larval stages hide in deep water or even in sediment to protect themselves from feeding pressure from fish. Older larval stages can penetrate into regions with very low oxygen concentrations and feed on the oxygen stored in their respiratory organs. The depth of the vertical migration depends on the dissolved oxygen present in the water column. At night, when they are protected by the darkness, the tufted mosquito larvae stay in the upper water regions to catch prey and to replenish their oxygen reserves. In order to facilitate the buoyancy to the surface of the water, the larvae use the sediment gas methane and introduce it into the entire water column during the ascent . As a result, some of the methane released escapes into the atmosphere, where it can contribute to global warming as a greenhouse gas .
Fossil evidence
Probably the oldest fossil record of a tufted mosquito comes from a deposit in Central Jurassic in Siberia. In addition, the family is known from various Cretaceous (Lebanon amber, Lower Cretaceous , approx. 130 million years old and the somewhat younger Siberian amber) and tertiary (mainly Eocene Baltic amber and Miocene Dominican amber ) occurrences of amber.
literature
- Michael Chinery: Parey's Book of Insects ; Franckh-Kosmos Verlags-GmbH & Co. KG, Stuttgart, 2004, ISBN 3-440-09969-5
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ see photo gallery on diptera.info
- ↑ Manuel Weisser, Hilmar Hofmann, Jorge Encinas Fernández, Frank Peeters: Vertical migration patterns of the different larval instars of Chaoborus flavicans and the influence of dissolved oxygen concentrations . In: Canadian Journal of Fisheries and Aquatic Sciences . tape 75 , no. 7 , July 2018, ISSN 0706-652X , p. 1142–1150 , doi : 10.1139 / cjfas-2017-0157 .
- ^ Daniel F. McGinnis, Sabine Flury, Kam W. Tang, Hans-Peter Grossart: Porewater methane transport within the gas vesicles of diurnally migrating Chaoborus spp .: An energetic advantage. In: Scientific Reports. 7, 2017, doi : 10.1038 / srep44478 .
- ↑ Mosquito larvae surf on methane bubbles. In: biooekonomie.de. March 23, 2017. Retrieved November 20, 2019 .
- ↑ Archive link ( Memento of the original dated May 11, 2008 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. fossil Diptera
- ↑ George O. Poinar, Jr .: Life in Amber . 350 pp., 147 figs., 10 plates, Stanford University Press, Stanford (Cal.) 1992. ISBN 0-8047-2001-0
- ↑ Wolfgang Weitschat and Wilfried Wichard: Atlas of plants and animals in Baltic amber , 256 p., Numerous. Fig., Pfeil-Verlag, Munich 1998. ISBN 3-931516-45-8
