Bug Encyclopedia
Search and identify bugs & insects — beetles, butterflies, moths, ants, bees, spiders and more — with size, habitat, danger, behavior, and how to tell them apart.
Mosquito
A slender, long-legged fly with a needle-like proboscis, narrow wings, and a distinctive high-pitched wing hum, most active around dawn, dusk, and in shaded, humid areas.
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Mosquito Larva
A wriggling, comma-shaped aquatic larva that hangs from the water's surface to breathe before transforming into a flying adult mosquito.
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Anopheles Mosquito
A slim, mottled-winged mosquito best known for the distinctive head-down, tail-up posture it strikes while resting on walls and vegetation.
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Aedes Mosquito
A boldly patterned, day-active mosquito genus known for its black-and-white striped legs and habit of breeding in the smallest pockets of water.
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Culex Mosquito
A large, worldwide genus of plain brown mosquitoes recognizable by their blunt abdomens and habit of resting flat against surfaces.
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Yellow Fever Mosquito
A dark mosquito marked with a lyre-shaped pattern of white scales on its thorax, closely tied to human dwellings and the water-filled containers people leave standing around them.
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Common House Mosquito
A slender, drab brown mosquito that emerges at dusk from catch basins and forgotten containers to fill neighborhoods with its familiar high-pitched whine.
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Asian Tiger Mosquito
A small, dark mosquito boldly marked with silvery-white stripes, including one distinctive stripe running straight down the center of its back, that bites readily in broad daylight.
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Non-Biting Midge
A mosquito look-alike that gathers by the thousands in swirling mating swarms near lakes and ponds, despite lacking any ability to bite.
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Crane Fly
A long-legged, mosquito-like fly with a slender tan or gray body and a single pair of narrow wings, often seen wobbling clumsily around outdoor lights on summer evenings.
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Midge
A slender, mosquito-like fly that forms dense swarms near water at dusk, easily mistaken for a mosquito but lacking any biting mouthparts.
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Gall Midge
A delicate, mosquito-like fly whose larvae trigger plants to grow strange, often colorful swellings called galls, each species usually tied to one particular host plant.
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Fungus Gnat
A small, dark, mosquito-like fly with long legs and delicate smoky wings, often seen weakly fluttering around houseplants or crawling across damp potting soil.
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Ichneumon Wasp
A slender, long-antennaed parasitoid wasp, often mistaken for a giant mosquito or a stinging insect, that is best known for the extraordinarily long ovipositor some species use to drill into wood and lay eggs on hidden larvae.
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Human Bot Fly
A stout, dark-bodied fly from the American tropics famous for an unusual reproductive trick: it captures a blood-feeding mosquito mid-flight and glues its own eggs to the mosquito's body before releasing it to carry them to a future host. The adult itself is rarely seen, spending most of its short life in shaded forest understory.
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