World Mosquito Day: How mosquitoes help our ecology

How mosquitoes help ecology

There are around 3,500 species of mosquitoes, but not all of them bite humans.

Usually, female mosquitoes bite for blood, just to develop their eggs. The major work that mosquitoes do in our environment is to help in pollination. For mosquitoes, a major source of food is flower nectar (not human blood), from which they get plant sugar and associated nutrients.

In the course of getting their food through flower nectar, they visit several plants and pollinate them.

Mosquito pollination is hard to see, as most mosquitoes visit flowers near or after dusk and human presence dissuades mosquitoes from flowers near them.

Mosquitoes are also a part of the food web. Several animals — from cockroaches to lizards — all prey on mosquitoes. Even hummingbirds rely on small flying insects and spiders as a primary food source.

Mosquitoes are a primary pollinator for some orchids found in the wild. Similarly, there are few, if any, animal species that feed exclusively on mosquitoes.

Also, mosquito larvae grow by consuming microorganisms such as algae and microbes from decaying plant material.

Adult mosquitoes that die or are eaten and excreted, then decompose, turning the microbes they consumed as larvae into nutrients for plants, completing another important ecological function.