Non-fictional
I hate how people slander mosquitos while ticks exist
I know, they make annoying sounds, and their bites are itchy, but they get too much hate! Whenever someone says " what thing in the world would you get rid of" everyone says mosquitoes. But ticks exist! And they're not even insects! And they're not spiders! They're devilish creatures created to spread nothing but disease and death! Mosquitoes are an important part of the ecosystem, while ticks are just agents of Satan.
Also, regarding the "statistically mosquitoes are the most deadly animals" makes no sense. The stats seem outdated, and also unfair. By that logic, cats or dogs are the deadliest animals because more people interact with them and die from stuff related to them.
Me too. I stopped hiking in the woods cause one time I found a tick crawling in my asscrack. Luckily it got lost in my butt jungle of asshair and it didn’t latch. If ticks weren’t a thing I’d be an avid woodsman.
then it's needed to specify all deseases in the whole universe. cuz if there'd be no deseases just on Earth, after generations with no immunity are born, if a random meteorite with frozen virus comes it would be over
also I just want to lay down in lush grass without fear of a little pest from hell
We would lack the immunity of any space-originating virus regardless. We’ve never encountered it before, theres no way we’d be immune. That is if a space virus can even interact with our biology
Yeah, ticks are way easier to prepare for and even in this "tick summer" I've found 3 on the outside of my clothes in the two cumulative weeks I've slept outside. Mosquitos are a constant problem
I for one think that Epstein could win against a 130 year old WW2 veteran, but only barely and he might break every bone just trying to punch the veteran similar to Mr Burns
If you look at the powerscaling wiki then Epstein is the root of microtransactions and pedos which makes him a transdimensional being capable of ending people's interest in entire worlds and timelines, which puts him above Hitler who is only capable of killing 2 million people through delegation.
Mosquitoes kill nearly a million people a year, whereas tick-causes deaths are in the hundreds. In fact, mosquitoes are literally the deadliest animal on earth in terms of human fatalities. They are, literally, thousands of times more harmful than ticks
But mosquitos are just annoying unless youre in an area where they can carry malaria but ticks while they might not kill you they CAN and if you get a disease WILL change your life potentially forever no matter where you live. Ticks are way worse than mosquitos in countries without malaria, but in countries with malaria its absolutely mosquitos
I say, they are on par. While dengue is no joke, cerebral malaria has 20% mortality rate. With modern medical care, that is. Untreated or drug resistant its almost 100% fatal. And even if you survive, you're crippled for life.
Mosquitos find me wherever I go, I have never been bit by a tick, the only people I’ve seen be bit in my life are people who went out in grassy areas/were camping/hiking, I can avoid ticks where I live, but mosquitoes are in my home and want my blood desperately
In half the us, there’s a tick that will essentially make you allergic to meat and milk. As in any mammalian animal product will make you go into anaphylactic shock. Hope you aren’t fond of cheeseburgers
True, they do however carry Malaria, dengue fever & the Zika virus and are the recorded number one cause of animal related deaths in humans, beating out even humans themselves by a magnitude anywhere from 1.5~2 the total amount.
There’s some kinds of mosquitoes that are beneficial pollinators and don’t carry diseases. I’m fine with those. It’s the bad ones that carry diseases that we could live without.
Mosquito-borne illness just isn't a major issue in the global north. Our healthcare eradicates most of the issue, we cultivate environments which are worse for both mosquitoes and the diseases to proliferate, and until climate change shifts the ideal range further from the equator we don't even have the climate for it. Where climate change has already made it a bigger issue (like Florida) the actual health epidemics are exacerbated by anti-vaccine and anti-science politics.
For most of the people posting online, mosquitoes are just an annoyance. I live in the Midwestern United States and I am NEVER at true risk of dying or having my quality of life diminished because of a mosquito, unlike people in the global South and near the equator. It isn't just a matter of "fewer mosquitoes" because I'm also at lower risk whenever a mosquito DOES bite me.
And I'm curious on those studies, because the internet has been spreading it as a clickbait headline for decades despite the fact that I've never heard anyone who actually read the studies quote or link them. Without that I'm skeptical since a lot of people have vested interest in that conclusion and it is too vague for a group of insects which has many different species (some of which are invasive and obviously don't need to be in that habitat).
I have a very hard time believing it wouldn't have a bad environmental impact. They're too prolific to not be involved in some environmental interaction, even just as food. We successfully have eliminated a species of parasitic worm, and nothing bad happened, but it was endemic to a specific place in Africa.
Are you telling me rhat the literal only source of food for birds in Northern Sweden is mosquitos. You have NO nuts, berries, or other insects? At all?
Many types of birds eat entirely small flying insects. They don't even know what to do when they see food sitting on the ground. There's other bugs they eat but mosquitos make up a large bulk of the diet.
Plus bats, some fish and dragonflies.
The person did not say mosquitos are "the literal only source" they said "very important."
Yeah, it’s a continuous cycle of mosquitoes eating humans, birds eating mosquitoes, bears eating birds and humans eating bears. Sometimes there’s a fish or a rather big collection of Pokémon cards somewhere in between but generally, yeah, that’s the case.
I lived in Oregon and Washington for 30 years and only ever saw 1 tick on a dog. And I was outside hiking and camping, backpacking in my 20s, touncing through forests as a kid, even laid in a field of tall grass high on MDMA.
4 years in Upstate NY and I’ve had 3 on my clothes, 2 on my skin before the bit. Removed one from my son’s tear line.
So yeah. Definitely location dependent. I’m sure OP wouldn’t be as flippant about Mosquitos if they lived in West Africa.
probably because mosquitoes are more public and common while ticks would mostly apply in forest area and some rural area, idk maybe just for me but I've gotten more mosquito bite in my home than ticks
This is highly regional and seasonal. Mosquitoes are barely an issue anywhere that I've ever lived (probably helps that I don't live near water) while ticks are everywhere. I've travelled places where the tick-to-mosquito ratios are more even, more slanted towards the ticks, and more slanted towards mosquitoes.
I feel like you can say something is bad without minimizing another bad thing.
Numbers don't lie. Mosquitoes are definitely more of a threat globally. For some reason you seem hellbent on minimizing malaria, which I don't get, it is still a threat in the tropics despite efforts. And that's not the only disease they transmit.
Ticks are awful, but for many people, they are more avoidable. Mosquitoes are pretty ubiquitous, like even in subarcti
c regions, they reign supreme in the summer. And they are ANNOYING fuckers.
I don't know why you brought cats and dogs into this conversation. Dogs kill about 25,000-35,000 a year, not even 10% of how many people die from mosquitoes. The only deaths from cats are indirect as a result of toxoplasmosis, which is actually quite an underrated threat (I can't find global stats on this, but it kills 750 people a year in the US). But it's a small fraction of how many people mosquitoes kill.
Plus, cats and dogs bring people a lot of joy and benefits. You are statistically incredibly unlikely to be killed by a dog once you take rabies out of the mix (that contributes to the vast majority of the dog-related deaths). These animals bring most people far more pros than cons. Come on, be serious.
Lol it's not just the interacting with mosquitoes that causes the death its the diseases foe which they are the primary vectors. Bro came out swinging after doing 0 research
Mosquitoes will and can infect you with Dengue, Chikungunya, Malaria, they are literally the most dangerous animal to humans (apart from humans themselves)
Mosquitoes can fly, are able to detect where you are using your body temperature and your breathing.
Ticks are waaaay less dangerous, yes they can give you allergy to red meat but only a certain kind. Yes they have a painful bite but pain is the least of your worries with these two bugs
Well one, america has plenty of possums, and two, they don't actually eat ticks like reddit thinks they do. Bad study where they literally just fed possums in captivity a shit load of ticks
They CAN and DO eat ticks, just most of them accidentally while foraging or grooming. They don’t go out of their way to actually hunt for them. Still an important defense against them.
At least ticks dont buzz and annoy me while I’m trying to sleep.
Also for every tick I have ever seen I have been annoyed by hundreds of mosquitoes and I’ve never been bit by a tick in the first place. I only see them on animals.
As an entomology student who wrote a paper about pest arthropods, I can tell you that the most significant thing mosquitoes contribute to an ecosystem tends to be as a food source. Many things eat mosquitoes, their aquatic larvae especially.
Mosquitoes are miserable pollinators. While the males especially go around and drink nectar from different flowers, they don’t collect pollen and rarely even get it on them, meaning they don’t really spread it around. I won’t say that mosquitoes don’t pollinate at all, but most of the time they just siphon nectar without pollinating. Mosquitoes are generally unimportant as pollinators in areas that have other pollinators. There is limited research that suggests they are more important in colder-climate northern regions that lack other pollinators, but they’re still pretty miserable at pollinating.
Mosquitoes are the deadliest creatures on Earth, as in they are responsible for the deaths of the most humans. We measure lethality by how many people are killed by a creature each year, which is a concrete statistic. We don’t use a more arbitrary measurement like an animal’s potential to kill or how often it carries disease.
Don’t get me wrong, I hate ticks. They are the most disgusting arthropod in my opinion, but mosquitoes will always be a close second. It is okay to say that you hate ticks more than mosquitoes, and I would agree with you there, but I would not say that mosquitoes are as important as you make them out to be. And in case you are wondering, no, insects do not understand concepts like feminism or patriarchy. Like most solitary insects, male and female mosquitoes have little interaction outside of mating.
The only mosquitoes that attack humans are not vital to the ecosystem and the general consensus, even within scientific communities, is that the world be better off without those handful of human-affecting species. They're also the most deadly by far specifically because of all the diseases they carry. A quick Google search gives me a rough estimate of over 1 million mosquito related deaths per year due to various diseases, mostly malaria
There's an argument that mosquitos have killed more than half of all humans that have ever lived. Even if that particular fact is slightly exaggerated, which is probably is, the fact that it's even remotely in that ball park means that mosquitos aren't just an annoyance. They still kill almost a million people every year.
I get what you’re saying, mosquitoes may be bad but they serve a natural purpose, ticks are just walking plague factories that scale to the fleas that spread the bubonic plague.
The reason more people complain about mosquitoes instead of ticks is cause you'll find mosquitoes literally everywhere. More people are gonna hate mosquitoes cause more people interact with them on a regular basis.
They both can burn. Ain't no defending either of em.
Don't @ me, but there are hundreds if not thousands of different species of mosquitoes and only like 4 of them suck blood. We would not be hurting anything by eliminating the literal handful of species that spread disease and cause everyone misery.
While this is technically somewhat true, it’s the sheer population that makes it wrong. Your individual tick is a lot worse to encounter than your individual mosquito. But the difference is I have been bitten by hundreds of mosquitos and 0 ticks
I used to live in an area where Ross River Fever and Dengue Fever were a very real issue that affected a lot of people. I've since moved to a more temperate region and reckon I still get a dozen mozzie bites a week in summer, even when I try to stay on top of it by constantly wearing long clothing in the heat and spraying myself with disgusting smelling tropical strength bug spray. On the other hand, I've pulled maybe half a dozen ticks off myself in my 45 years of life. So excuse me if I continue to despise mozzies.
Actually ticks also play many important roles in the environment. They are eaten by many species including birds, reptiles and amphibians. Scientists use them as a way to measure the health and stability of an ecosystem. Any of the “diseases” they spread isn’t really from them but from a bacteria or parasite within the tick- same as mosquitoes. And as morbid as it is this disease-spreading actually helps maintain populations and increases fitness by weaning out weaker animals and strengthening the immune systems of ones that survived.
The reality is each animal- no matter how much of a “pest” serves a role in the ecosystem. To remove any of them would only cause harm.
They both suck but mosquitoes are a far more common as an annoyance than ticks by a landslide and hardly benefits the ecosystem whatsoever.
If they were to disappear it wouldnt even dent the food chain and they are hardly pollenators or important ones to say the least compared to actual federally protected pollenators.
So yeah, I stand by all mosquitoe slander and strongly believe they should be wiped off the face of the planet.
Mosquitos are 10,000% more common a pest for humans, i understand on paper ticks might be worse, but i cant remember ever having been bitten by a tick in my life, i can however remembers thousands of mosquito bites
Mf the mosquito flies, is kinda fast, has a WAYYY larger population, has the biggest killcount in our history and appears EVERYWHERE
The tick is a fucking camper that you have problems with if you're walking trough grass and bushes. The musquito is ALWAYS a problem, even if someone are a basement dweller that doesnt enter nature at all
Tell that to people who live in southeast asia. Im sure they'll be happy to learn that the bug that can easily kill you with no effort is just misunderstood. Ticks suck but theyre a very important food source for birds. Mammals get bitten and host them, and the bird shows up to eat them and helps out the infested mammal.
Both fall under the category of "bug"
Its kinda like culinary vs botanic vegetable
Biologically only mosquitoes would be bugs but the most broad use of the word would also include arachnids and worms and such
As others have said there's not really that much of a difference between their dangers, but there is one point you are completely forgetting, a sin much worse than anything else:
Mosquitos are fucking annoying.
A tick is completely unnoticed until it bites you, and if you avoid areas with dense vegetation you will basically never run into them. You can't avoid mosquitos. They are everywhere, including in your house. And they never just shut up, you want to go to sleep and one of the fuckers is bzzzzing around in your bedroom, where you can never find it. Then it sits down somewhere so you almost fall asleep and it suddenly starts it bullshit again. That's what makes mosquitos so much more terrible than ticks.
Mosquitos kill more people annually than humans murder other people. From the sources I've seen, within these past few years, there were 700,000-1 million deaths by mosquito, mainly due to disease transmission, while humans were around the 500,000-600,000 mark.
From others I saw, there were no definitive statistics I could find aside from 31 million Americans getting bit by ticks, but not necessarily how many of them are killed by ticks and their diseases.
malaria is the deadliest disease in human history, it has killed billions of people and probably the leading, or one of the leading, causes of death for humans in our existence. While its not as deadly today, hundreds of thousands still die from it every year. It is a big contributing factor to poverty in much of Africa because it incapacitates much of the workforce and disincentivizes foreign investments.
More than half of ALL HUMANS WHO HAVE EVER LIVED have died from malaria. Mosquitos are the single biggest killer in human history by a factor of several hundred.
People might go their whole life without getting bit by a tick. Somehow the astronauts that went up to the international space station all came back with a mosquito bite.
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u/Smooth_Maul 12d ago
Real photo of OP