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英文原稿
引文
Smaller than a child’s thumbnail, these insects remain the most dangerous nonhuman animals on the planet.
They are mosquitos.
We squash them. We poison-bomb them. We drain their habitats, breed them in lab to confound their DNA. And yet “we have no silver bullet” for those vampires in the air.
正文
A mosquito’s bite can pass on brutal diseases: zika, malaria, yellow fever and dengue.
A mosquito homes in on you by sensing the proximity of blood from your sweat, your breath, your warmth.
Her feeding apparatus is a skin-piercing bundle of tiny stylets that can suck your blood while injecting saliva with an anticoagulant.
A mosquito can slip that fascicle into your skin so gently that you have no idea what’s happening until the blood meal is already under way.
She can sip your blood until she’s more than twice her weight.
Yes, your vampire is always a female. In the mosquito world, the female is the biter because she needs blood nutrients for her eggs. Laying eggs and nourishing them are the great project of her short (usually month-long) life.
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