When a mosquito bites you, it injects specially evolved saliva to numb the area, so you feel nothing, but can they numb themselves? Insect biology is very different from mammals.
It’s hard to tell the way they think without being able to ask, but science has come a long way. Do mosquitoes feel pain?
Mosquitoes can sense when they have been damaged and feel a sense of irritation, however they don’t feel pain. Mosquitoes can’t feel pain or process emotions because they don’t have pain receptors called nociceptors in their brain. Feeling pain is as much about having an emotional response as it is about the physical nerve-ending based sensation of extreme distress.
Table of Contents
Do Mosquitoes Feel Pain When They Burst
If you’ve seen too many cartoons, or you’re a fan of Gary Larson’s The Far Side comics, then you may think mosquitoes burst all the time.
There’s a myth that you can ‘pop’ a mosquito if you flex when they land and bite you. The idea that raising the pressure in a blood vessel will somehow overfill a mosquito is funny but not based on reality.
Scientists have found a way to make mosquitoes overfill and burst. When you sever the ventral nerve, the mosquito can’t judge when to stop.
While it would take incredibly specialized equipment to cut a mosquito’s nerves, it does imply that the insect would feel nothing upon bursting because the nerve is disconnected.
Intriguingly, the fact that you can disconnect a nerve in a mosquito has other implications. Nerves send impulses to the brain, indicating things like pain and pleasure.
Oddly, while a mosquito that bursts from overfeeding probably feels nothing, it also implies that an average, undamaged mosquito responds to something akin to feeling.
Can Mosquitoes Get Hurt
Whether or not a mosquito feels the pain, it can absolutely get hurt. In this case, a ‘hurt’ would be any damage to the mosquitoes’ body that significantly impairs its quality of life. For example, a mosquito can lose a wing or break a leg.
While that isn’t the sort of ‘hurt’ involving emotions, and it can happen without physical sensation, it is still damaging. Even a mosquito would notice if it can’t fly or walk normally.
Intriguingly, mosquitoes that have experienced damage in the past can learn. They will go out of their way to avoid taking similar damage and re-injuring a previously hurt body part.
Is reacting to an injury and having a memory that allows you to avoid future problems of a similar nature the same as feeling pain? I don’t know.
Scientists don’t know either, though they have theories and opinions. The fact is, as of this writing, there haven’t been enough studies done to determine conclusively whether a mosquito can feel pain as we recognize it.
Do Mosquitoes Have Pain Receptors
When you or I feel pain, it is because we have nociceptors. You probably know them by their common name, ‘pain receptors.’
This is how we feel pain, and it’s the only type of pain we recognize in other species at this time.
However, that doesn’t mean it’s impossible for a different kind of pain receptor to exist that we don’t yet understand well enough to recognize. That said, mosquitoes have no nociceptors that we know of.
The thing about feeling pain is that it’s a lot like feeling love. Unless your species has an evolutionary reason to develop something, it won’t waste the energy.
Everything has a cost in terms of development, and the more complex your form and abilities, the longer you have to raise your young so they can develop more than size after the egg stage.
Humans have an incredibly complex lifestyle and social community that spans and dominates life on earth because we have pain receptors, emotions, and complicated communication systems.
We also raise our young and pass knowledge to them. Mosquitoes don’t need any of that to thrive.
Do Mosquitoes Feel Heat And Cold
The sense of heat and cold is very different from pain, though either extreme can undoubtedly hurt a human. What about mosquitoes?
Are these pests able to differentiate between hot and cold, and if so, do they react to the physical sensation?
Again, it’s all but impossible to say they feel temperatures as ‘painful’ in any way we’d understand, but they do react to the presence of heat.
Like reptiles, mosquitoes are cold-blooded. According to Central Massachusetts Mosquito Prevention, that means, “…they are incapable of regulating body heat and their temperature is essentially the same as their surroundings. Mosquitoes function best at 80 degrees F, become lethargic at 60 degrees F, and cannot function below 50 degrees F.”
Cold causes mosquitoes to hibernate, or lay eggs and then die off depending on species.
Do Insects Feel Pain When Sprayed
Sometimes, when you spray an insect, it falls lifeless to the ground. However, other times it writes around, flailing and twitching in a manner that would indicate extreme distress and pain if it were human.
However, bugs are not human. An insect that is sprayed and dying certainly notices that something is different and fights to correct its course and move normally, but that isn’t pain.
Pain includes both a physically unpleasant sensation and an emotional response like fear and sadness.
While a mosquito or spider may ‘feel’ frustration or irritation at not performing normally, there’s just no evidence that they can also ‘feel’ pain even when sprayed.
Helpful Tips To Know If Mosquitoes Feel Pain
Mosquitoes have nerve endings, but they don’t appear to feel pain the same way we understand it. However, feeling irritation, pressure, heat and cold, or other pain-adjacent sensations is similar.
Here are more helpful tips to know if mosquitoes feel pain.
- Pain is as much about having an emotional response as it is about the physical nerve-ending based sensation of extreme distress. Mosquitoes don’t appear to have both of these elements and may not have either. Instead, they replace it with recognizing a problem and learning to avoid or correct the issue to continue to do what they always do.
- Mosquitoes may not feel pain, but fruit flies appear to have pain or discomfort receptors. According to Smithsonian Magazine, “…fruit flies, in particular, feel something akin to acute pain called “nociception.” When they encounter extreme heat, cold, or physically harmful stimuli, they react much in the same way humans react to pain. Now, scientists have found that the nervous systems of insects can also experience chronic pain.”
- Mosquito bites can do more than cause us pain. They can also spread diseases. These pest insects carry dengue fever and several other conditions which are dangerous to humans. However, it’s unknown whether the infected bugs feel sickness or pain from being disease carriers.
Final Thoughts
Mosquitoes can cause us pain, but there’s no reason to believe that we can return the favor. Since these pests lack emotional responses and nociceptors, which are how we determine that other species can ‘feel pain,’ the only conclusion we can come to based on current scientific understanding is that mosquitoes cannot feel pain.
However, they can sense heat and cold and learn to avoid damage if they’ve survived it in the past. Interestingly, those reactions could be the evolutionary precursor to developing emotions and pain receptors in the future.
I never recommend harming a living creature needlessly, but you can relax a little if you’re concerned about swatting mosquitoes.
