Like, I can understand venomous insects and arachnoids using it for hunting (spiders) or defense (hornets), but mosquitoes make their own life harder by their bites being itchy, as it facilitates their ‘prey’ wanting to kill the mosquito.
In: Biology
The itch from a mosquito bite is an allergic reaction to the mosquitos saliva.
Mosquitos inject a mild anesthetic when they bite you making it harder for you to notice. The allergic reaction and resulting itchy bump happens sometime after the bite.
Not everyone is allergic to it though, some people don’t react to mosquito bites at all.
Mosquitos don’t try to give you an itch, the itch is organism’s immune reaction to poison in the mosquito saliva. The actual poison effect prevents blood from clotting and blood vessels from constricting – that helps it continue drinking blood.
By the time the itch appears a mosquito is long gone so it has no effect on its survival whatsoever.
We evolved the itch to detect the foreign substance. The mosquito just needs the protein to keep your blood from cloting for a bit. It doesn’t care if you itch or don’t.
It doesn’t take much heat to denature the protein that causes the itch and when its fresh it’s not very deep, so a hot spoon (or sometimes I heat up the metal on a lighter) can stop the itch and bump from every happening if you catch it right away.
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