Asian tiger mosquito
Aedes albopictus
— Where the name comes from
Aedes comes from the Greek aēdḗs, “unpleasant, troublesome”: literally “that which gives no pleasure”, with the alpha privative before hēdýs, sweet. It is one of the rare scientific names that describe not the animal but the effect it has. Albopictus is Latin for “painted white”, after the silver stripes on black that also give the insect its Italian name.
— Facts
- Group
- Insects · Insecta
- Order
- Flies
- Habitat
- Any standing water: saucers under pots, tyres, drains
- Range
- Native to South-East Asia, now in Europe, the Americas, Africa
- Size
- 2–10 mm, with a white line down the middle of the thorax
- Diet
- Nectar; only females bite, to mature their eggs
- Lifespan
- 3–6 weeks as an adult
— Characteristics
- 01
It bites by day, not at dawn and dusk like European mosquitoes.
- 02
Its eggs survive drying for months and hatch with the first rain.
- 03
A bottle cap of water is enough for it to breed.
— What sets it apart
It reached Europe and America inside used tyres, exported by the million to be retreaded: in the rainwater standing in stacked tyres the eggs travelled dry and hatched on arrival. In Italy it appeared in 1990 in a yard in Genoa and within thirty years had colonised almost the whole peninsula. The eggs tolerate desiccation for over a year, which means emptying saucers is not enough: they have to be scrubbed as well.
