Mosquito Bite

Every summer we are advised to empty all outside containers to prevent mosquitos from laying their eggs. After reading "Mosquito Bite," we will put out insect bombs, spray fog every evening, hire pesticide services, call in the army... If I sound extreme, you will, too, after reading this book. It is graphic and creepy. Let your children read this text for their own safety. Better yet, read it together and discuss how to protect yourselves from these varmits. This is the best kind of children's book because it is informative, brilliantly laid out, and totally engrossing. Two parallel stories come together to explain how a mosquito works. Children are outside playing hide and seek. Little brother hides next to an old tire once filled with water. Yes, big sister seeks him, but so does a mosquito filled with eggs. She needs blood for her brood. When the mosquito lands on the boy, the story switches to the life cycle of this particular mosquito, to more or less personalize what a mosquito goes through. Dennis Kunkel's colorized electron micrographs take over the story. These teeny tiny photo(micro)graphs depict an amazing, though eerie world of eggs, egg rafts, larva which feed on diatoms/plankton living in standing water, the pupae stage, and then adult mosquitos. They begin to seek mates not long after they break from the pupa. But back to the boy's story: The mosquito brings her proboscis to the back of the boy's neck, then uses her knives and cutters (yep, that's what they are called) to open up the boy's skin in order to insert two tubes, one to inject chemically loaded saliva to keep the blood flowing, the other to sip blood. Sated, she flies to a nearby tree to rest and let the extra blood drain out. Most mosquitos live just a few days, others die within thirty days. A few hibernate over the winter to begin the mosquito population again in the spring. The boy hopefully lives to old age.

Astonshing photographs of the mosquito in all stages of development will captivate readers. The images are colored to enhance the insect's physical featuress. Facts are interspersed with black and white photographs of children playing hide and seek at dusk, during mosquito prime hunting time. I was sharing this book with some elementary aged kids and one boy commented that the insects looked like aliens. This is a fascinating look at worlds too small to be seen with our own eyes.