Mosquitoes have been around for over two hundred million years, and are a real annoyance. A Spanish name given to this annoying little pest, mosquito goes by several nicknames, including mozzies in Africa and gnats in Europe.
As they kill almost two million people around the world each year, mosquitoes are deemed by many as one of the most deadly living things on the planet. They can carry with them several diseases, including encephalitis, dengue, yellow fever, malaria, and chikungunya. Not only can they harm you and your family, but they can also affect the health of your pets. Therefore, you would want to keep mosquitoes out of your home.
To keep mosquitoes out of your home, there are a few important things that you need to know about. One of them is the altitude at which mosquitoes fly. So, what is the height that mosquitoes fly at? There is a common misconception about mosquitoes that they cannot fly higher than twenty five feet from the ground. However, that is ridiculous, to say the least. Here, we will look to establish exactly how high and far mosquitoes can fly.
How High Do Mosquitoes Fly?
Today, there are many people interested in knowing the flight height of mosquitoes. Some want to know this fact to keep these tiny pests out of their home while others are looking for this information for research purposes. No matter which category you fall into, you will benefit from reading this guide on the flight height of mosquitoes.
So, what is the height that mosquitoes can fly up to? This will vary according to the species of the mosquito and their surrounding conditions. However, the majority of the species of mosquitoes do not prefer flying very far from the breeding ground—vertically or horizontally. Nonetheless, to answer what you are here for, we will throw in some numbers that are based on scientific research.
Firstly, the misconception about the highest altitude of twenty five feet that a mosquito can fly to is inaccurate but not unfounded. It has been noticed, however, that most mosquitoes do not feel comfortable flying much higher from the surface when needed.
Some mosquitoes multiply in the holes of trees that are as high as forty feet while others can be found in apartments on the 22nd story. There is really no limit to how high mosquitoes can fly. Any vessel with a minimum one inch of standing water is the ideal breeding place for mosquitoes, no matter what height that container is present at.
To provide some more severe examples, if you believe that the elevation above sea level can be used to determine how high mosquitoes can fly, then you will be surprised to know that there are some species and colonies of mosquitoes that live at an elevation of eight thousand feet above sea level in the Himalayas. Mosquitoes can also fly, at least nine hundred and fifty feet high, in high altitude winds.
Despite all of the above, it is valid that most populations of mosquitoes prefer lower altitudes. Many people believe that this is because of the scarcity of oxygen in high altitude areas. However, the more likely cause is probably the lower temperatures in higher altitude places.
For instance, higher altitude regions in Africa had been free of malaria-borne mosquitoes for a lengthy period, since mosquitoes are not big fans of the cooler weather. However, with the rise of global warming, most of these places are now a few degrees colder than they were before and thus, have been infiltrated by mosquitoes that spread malaria.
How Do Mosquitoes Fly?
If we want to determine on your own how high mosquitoes can fly, then it is imperative for you to know how mosquitoes fly. Compared to other insects, mosquitoes have a completely different way of flying and they are not very good at that. They have shorter wings as compared to other flying insects and these wings are not very efficient at doing what they’re supposed to do.
The wings of mosquitoes have a very low range of motion. The entirety of that rotational movement is forty four degrees of the 360 degrees that would constitute a full circle. To give you an idea of how poor the rotational movement of a mosquito’s wings is, the motion range of a butterfly is 180 degrees, which is 136 degrees greater than that of mosquitoes.
What does this imply? It implies that mosquitoes need to pummel their wings with much higher intensity than butterflies and other flying insects to lift themselves from the ground. The approximate number of times they hit their wings in a second is eight hundred times. This is about four times more than the intensity employed by most of the other flying insects.
This type of movement with tiny wings creates some sort of vortex that enables them to move. That requires massive amounts of energy. This is why, as mosquitoes float around your ears, you hear an irritating high-pitch sound.
Since mosquitoes are so sluggish in flight, they cannot travel very far until they have had some rest. They can travel a long way from where they were born. It is just that make their journey with stoppages rather than at once. They “bounce” about, jumping a few feet and stopping over and over again. You can utilize this flying behavior of mosquitoes to not only determine how high and far they can fly, but also get rid of them before they even make their way into your backyard or house.
At first sight of a mosquito in your home or backyard, use the information provided above to track down the breeding place of mosquitoes in your neighborhood. Once you’ve found it, eliminate the source of the mosquitoes to ensure that you have no uninvited guests buzzing around your head when you finally sit down to have a nice feast at a dinner table after a long, hard day or week of work.
How Far Can Mosquitoes Fly?
This question is related to how high mosquitoes can fly. If you want to prevent an invasion of mosquitoes in your home, then you need to know both the height and distance that mosquitoes can fly to. We have already addressed the first part. Now, it is time to answer how far mosquitoes can fly. The simple answer to this is that mosquitoes cannot fly very far.
It is completely true that the majority of the species of mosquitoes do not like to venture very far from their breeding places, unless they are facing difficulty in finding food. Most species of mosquitoes tend to travel no more than fifty to a hundred meters from their breeding site. It is very unusual to find a mosquito that has travelled between one and three miles from its home.
Having said that, there are some species of mosquitoes, like the saltmarsh mosquitoes, that are believed to regularly travel between twenty and forty miles from their breeding site. They have been seen to ride the winds at high elevation to try out new breeding grounds. Also, it is widely seen in some regions that mosquitoes expand their colonies at a time to several hundred feet.
Summary
In this article, we discussed how high mosquitoes could fly. One of the most important things we found was that the height that mosquitoes can fly up to varies according to the species of the mosquito and their surrounding conditions. While the majority of the species of mosquitoes do not prefer flying very far from the breeding ground, we can find many flies in the holes of trees that are as high as forty feet and others on the 22nd story of apartments. In fact, some species of mosquitoes can be found at an elevation of eight thousand feet above sea level in the Himalayas.
In addition to how high mosquitoes can fly, we also looked at the method/technique used by mosquitoes to fly and the distance they can travel at a time. Using the information above, you can determine how far and high the mosquitoes in your neighborhood can fly to. This will allow you to track down the breeding place of mosquitoes in your neighborhood and then eliminate the source of the mosquitoes to ensure they are no uninvited guests buzzing around in your home or backyard.
Related Questions
How Fast Can Mosquitoes Fly?
This is related to the two questions already answered in this guide. To give a straightforward answer to this question, mosquitoes typically fly at a speed of one to one and a half miles per hour when there is no wind around.