What happens to female mosquitoes which want to lay egg but couldn't find mammal host for blood, will that mosquito simply die, if no mammals in area would mosquitoes will be absent too?
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$\begingroup$ Interesting question. Mosquitoes are pretty much ubiquitous except in Antarctica, so lack of food evidently isn't a problem for the species as a whole. Not all mosquitoes feed exclusively on mammals - Wikipedia says "Thousands of species feed on the blood of various kinds of hosts, mainly vertebrates, including mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians, and even some kinds of fish. Some mosquitoes also attack invertebrates, mainly other arthropods." $\endgroup$– user25309Commented Apr 11, 2017 at 15:39
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2 Answers
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It depends which part of the world of the mosquito's habitat. An Anopheles gambiae. in Africa has a life-span of 10 days maximum, the failure of the female to take a blood meal is pretty devastating on the survival of their lineage. In this case, the female has obligatory blood-feeding (lineages that don't simply don't persist).
All male mosquitoes exclusively feed on nectar, whereas for anopheline females, I suspect facultative nectar-feeding is restricted to sylvatic mosquitos, but even then the life-span of the female is critical.
Considering Aedes aegyti their entire life cycle within a domestic domiciliary, so nectar-feeding is too risky for the females. The objective of the species is to maximise offspring.
In general terms of the major medically important mosquito I would suspect that only Culex spp. will females exclusively engage in facultative blood feeding, because all members of the genus are sylvatic. As the above post-mentions in temperate climate mosquitoes are believed to "over-wintering", although I don't know many winter flowers for nectar sources.
Aedes and Anopheles have one or more domestic or semi-domestic species.
Reference for Anopheles gambae The Garki project: research on the epidemiology and control of malaria in the Sudan savanna of West Africa Source(s): World Health Organization (WHO) Countries: Nigeria Authors: L. Molineaux and G. Gramiccia
Reference on Culex and Aedes The Biology of Disease Vectors 1st Edition by Barry J. Beaty (Editor), William C. Marquardt (Editor)
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$\begingroup$ Hi! I think you have a great response here. However, I would encourage you to add some references as well as checking out the posting and answering guidelines in the Help Center. $\endgroup$– L.B.Commented Apr 3 at 14:51
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Usually, the function of having blood meals is to produce eggs but not for surviving. Some exceptions are for overwintering species which uses some blood-feed meals to survive during winter such as Culex pipiens.
In absence of blood host (the host depends on mosquito species and can range from fish to mammals!) and after mating, the female would just keep looking for a host (and some sugar source to stay alive) until she dies. So there is no reason for not living as long as in the case she would have found one or several hosts in her entire life (a couple of weeks usually).
