how come mosquitoes making such a distinctive high-pitched buzzing noise when other flying insects don’t?
In: Biology
The noise isn’t caused by the wings beating against the air. There’s an organ at the base of the mosquito’s wings that scrapes and makes the buzzing noise when the wings beat. This was discovered in 1902 when two British entomologists wrote a paper on it.
The mosquito we often hear buzzing in our ears is probably the Culex mosquito. They tend to bite around our faces because they are attracted to the carbon dioxide we breathe out. Other species tend to focus on other areas, such as around your feet or ankles, so you probably wouldn’t hear their buzz from so far away.
A combination of size and, well size.
The sound produced by the flapping of wings is directly related to the size and speed of the wings. So larger, slower wings are going to be lower pitched (think palmetto bugs or cicada) and smaller, faster wings are going to be higher pitched (think mosquitos).
But size is also important for the volume of the sound. A teeny tiny little bug’s wings are going to be quite quiet while a big massive bug will be louder. In the case of a mosquito they are small enough that we normally don’t hear them because they are so quiet, but they are making a very high pitched noise. Mosquitoes are also prone to flying in circles around our heads (because we’re their prey) so we get that sudden zzzZZZZZZZZZzzzz sound as they come close enough to our ears to hear them before they zoom off in another direction.
Finally, it’s because they were designed by Satan in his Hoboken laboratory to be as annoying a possible.
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