911 20 UNFORGETTABLE IMAGES OF THAT DAY

The terrorist attacks of 9/11 were captured in countless pictures by news photographers, bystanders, first responders, security cameras, FBI agents and others. Even an astronaut on the International Space Station took some.

Twenty years later, The Associated Press has curated 20 of its photographers’ frames from Sept. 11, 2001, when hijackers used commercial planes as missiles and crashed into New York’s World Trade Center, the Pentagon and a Pennsylvania field. The attacks killed nearly 3,000 people and toppled the trade center’s 110-story twin towers.

Pedestrians in lower Manhattan watch smoke billow from New York's World Trade Center on Tuesday, Sept. 11, 2001. (AP Photo/Amy Sancetta)

People cover their faces as they escape the collapse of New York's World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001. (AP Photo/Suzanne Plunkett)

A person falls from the north tower of New York's World Trade Center as another clings to the outside, left, while smoke and fire billow from the building, Tuesday Sept. 11, 2001. (AP Photo/Richard Drew)

These photos document the enormity, chaos and emotion of 9/11 on every scale, from panoramic views of smoke rising over New York’s skyline to a close-up of the anxious, smudged face of a woman hastening down a street blanketed with ashen dust.

Street scenes chart escalating horror as people stare and weep at the burning skyscrapers, then run from the dust cloud billowing through lower Manhattan after one of them crumbles. Flames shoot from the windows of the Pentagon, a global symbol of military might that proved vulnerable to an attack by a handful of Islamic militants. A falling human form, almost silhouetted against one of the trade center towers, shows one of the most agonizing horrors of all.

Flames and smoke pour from a building at the Pentagon in Washington on Tuesday, Sept. 11, 2001. (AP Photo/Will Morris)

Deputy chief of the Army Reserve, Col. Malcolm Bruce Westcott, comforts Pentagon employee Racquel Kelley while giving her medical aid outside the Pentagon in Washington on Tuesday, Sept. 11, 2001. (AP Photo/Will Morris)

Some show more intimate views of pain, but also humanity — an injured firefighter’s screaming face; a woman walking through the eerie blizzard of trade center debris with her arm around someone else’s shoulder; the then-deputy chief of the Army Reserve, Col. Malcolm Bruce Westcott, holding a comforting hand to Pentagon employee Racquel Kelley’s brow while assessing her for shock. There are images of determination, including firefighters working amid the smoky rubble and a shopkeeper sweeping up the dust of catastrophe.

Finally, as night falls, people gaze across New York Harbor at the smoke, trying to make sense of what happened in front of their eyes. As we still are today.

Thick smoke billows into the sky from the area behind the Statue of Liberty, lower left, where the World Trade Center was, on Tuesday, Sept. 11, 2001. (AP Photo/Daniel Hulshizer)

Fire and smoke billows from the north tower of New York's World Trade Center on Tuesday, Sept. 11, 2001. (AP Photo/David Karp)

People flee the falling South Tower of the World Trade Center on Tuesday, Sept. 11, 2001. (AP Photo/Amy Sancetta)

Smoke billows through buildings in Manhattan as seen from Brooklyn after the collapse of New York's World Trade Center, Tuesday, Sept. 11, 2001. (AP Photo/Kathy Willens)

Pedestrians flee the area of New York's World Trade Center in lower Manhattan on Tuesday, Sept. 11, 2001. (AP Photo/Amy Sancetta)

Harry Shasho sweeps up before being evacuated from his vitamin store after the collapse of New York's World Trade Center on Tuesday, Sept. 11, 2001. (AP Photo/Suzanne Plunkett)

Two women hold each other as they watch the World Trade Center burn in New York Tuesday, Sept. 11, 2001. (AP Photo/Ernesto Mora)

Smoke billows from one of the towers of the World Trade Center as flames and debris explode from the second tower, Tuesday, Sept. 11, 2001. (AP Photo/Chao Soi Cheong)

People walk over New York's Brooklyn Bridge from Manhattan to Brooklyn following the collapse of both World Trade Center towers on Sept. 11, 2001. (AP Photo/Mark Lennihan)

People flee the scene near New York's World Trade Center Tuesday, Sept. 11, 2001. (AP Photo/Diane Bondareff)

A fireman screams in pain as he is rescued shortly after both towers of New York's World Trade Center collapsed following a terrorist attack, Tuesday, Sept. 11, 2001. (Robert Mecea/Newsday via AP)

Firefighters work beneath the destroyed mullions, the vertical struts, of the World Trade Center in New York on Tuesday, Sept. 11, 2001. (AP Photo/Mark Lennihan)

A firefighter moves through piles of debris at the site of the World Trade Center in New York, Tuesday, Sept. 11, 2001. (AP Photo/Graham Morrison)

The remains of the World Trade Center stands amid the debris in New York, Tuesday, Sept. 11, 2001. (AP Photo/Alexandre Fuchs)

Pedestrians on Pierrepont Place in the Brooklyn borough of New York, watch as smoke billows from the remains of the World Trade Center in New York, Sept. 11, 2001. (AP Photo/Lawrence Jackson)

The Afghan Fiasco Will Stick to Biden

 

 

 

It hit at his reputational core. He no longer comes across as empathetic, much less serious.

Sept. 2, 2021 6:23 pm ET

  President Biden answer questions in Washington after remarks on the U.S. service members killed in the Afghanistan withdrawal.

Photo: Demetrius Freeman/The Washington Post via Getty Images

August changed things; it wasn’t just a bad month. It left a lingering, still head-shaking sense of “This isn’t how we do things.”

We don’t make up withdrawal dates that will have symbolism for photo-ops with the flinty, determined president looking flinty and determined on the 20th anniversary of 9/11; we don’t time epic strategic decisions around showbiz exigencies. We wait for the summer fighting season to pass; we withdraw in the winter when Taliban warriors are shivering in their caves. We don’t leave our major air base in the middle of the night—in the middle of the night—without even telling the Afghan military. We don’t leave our weapons behind so 20-year-old enemies can don them for military playacting and drive up and down with the guns and helmets. We don’t fail to tell our allies exactly what we’re doing and how we’re doing it—they followed us there and paid a price for it. We don’t see signs of an overwhelming enemy advance and treat it merely as a perception problem, as opposed to a reality problem. You don’t get the U.S. military out before the U.S. citizens and our friends. Who will protect them if you do that?

The president’s people think this will all just go away and are understandably trying to change the subject. But the essence of the story will linger. Its reverberations will play out for years. There are Americans and American friends behind Taliban lines. The stories will roll out in infuriating, sometimes heartbreaking ways. The damage to the president is different and deeper than his people think, because it hit at his reputational core, at how people understand him. His supporters have long seen him as soft-natured, moderate—a sentimental man famous for feeling and showing empathy. But nothing about this fiasco suggested kindliness or an interest in the feelings of others. It feels less like a blunder than the exposure of a seamy side. Does he listen to anyone? Does he have any people of independent weight and stature around him, or are they merely staffers who approach him with gratitude and deference?

What happened with U.S. military leadership? There’s been a stature shift there, too. Did they warn the president not to leave Bagram Air Base? Did they warn that the whole exit strategy was flawed, unrealistic? If the president was warned and rejected the advice why didn’t a general care enough to step down—either in advance to stop the debacle, or afterward to protest it?

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Did they just go with the flow? Did they think the president’s mind couldn’t be changed so what the heck, implement the plan on schedule and hope for the best? President Biden’s relations with the Pentagon have been cool at best for a long time; maybe some generals were thinking: I can improve future relations by giving the president more than he asks for. He wants out by 9/11, I’ll give him out by the Fourth of July. It is important to find out what dynamics were in play. Because it’s pretty obvious something went wrong there.

The enlisted men and women of the U.S. military are the most respected professionals in America. They can break your heart with their greatness, as they did at Hamid Karzai International Airport when 13 of them gave their lives to help desperate people escape. But the top brass? Something’s wrong there, something that August revealed. They are all so media-savvy, so smooth and sound-bitey after a generation at war, and in some new way they too seem obsessed with perceptions and how things play, as opposed to reality and how things are.

There has been a lot of talk about Mr. Biden and what drove his single-minded insistence on leaving on his timetable. Axios recently mentioned the 2010 Rolling Stone article in which Gen. Stanley McChrystal and his staff made brutal fun of Biden. Former Defense Secretary Robert Gates wrote in his 2014 memoir that President Obama told him, “Joe is over the top about this.” Mr. Obama himself, in his presidential memoir, wrote of Mr. Biden warning him the military was trying to “jam” him, “trying to box in a new president.”

People have been rereading George Packer’s great 2019 book on the diplomat Richard Holbrooke, “Our Man” (great not only as history but as literature). Holbrooke met with Vice President Biden one day during the first Obama term and they argued about Afghanistan. Mr. Biden dismissed Holbrooke’s arguments for protecting Afghan women’s rights as “bull—.” Their discussion was, according to Holbrooke’s diary, “quite extraordinary.” Mr. Biden said Holbrooke didn’t understand politics, that the Democrats could lose the presidency in 2012 in part because of Afghanistan, that we have to get out as we did from Vietnam.

There was politics in President Biden’s decision, and frustration. Mr. Biden had spent years in Afghanistan meetings, in the Senate during the Bush years, and later in the White House as vice president. He would have seen up close more than his share of military spin—contradictory information, no one with a sustainable strategic plan, and plenty of that old military tradition, CYA.

Afghanistan was emotional for him, for personal reasons. This would be connected to his son’s service in Iraq, and the worry a parent feels and the questions a parent asks. And maybe the things Beau Biden told him about his tour.

And I suspect there was plenty of ego in it, of sheer vanity. A longtime friend of his once told me Mr. Biden’s weakness is that he always thinks he’s the smartest guy in the room. I asked if the rooms are usually small, and the friend didn’t bristle, he laughed. I suspect Mr. Biden was thinking he was going to be the guy who finally cut through, who stopped the nonsense, admitted reality, who wasn’t like the others driven by fear of looking weak or incompetent. He was going to look with eyes made cool by experience and do what needed doing—cut this cord, end this thing, not another American dead.

History would see what he’d done. It would be his legacy. And for once he’d get his due—he’s not some ice-cream-eating mediocrity, not a mere palate-cleanser after the heavy meal of Trump, not a placeholder while America got its act together. He would finally be seen as what he is—a serious man. Un homme sérieux, as diplomats used to say.

And then, when it turned so bad so quick, his pride and anger shifted in, and the defiant, defensive, self-referential speeches. Do they not see my wisdom?

When you want it bad you get it bad.

This won’t happen, but it would be better for his White House not to scramble away from the subject—Let’s go to the hurricane!—but to inhabit it fully. Concentrate on the new reality of the new Afghanistan, the immediate and larger diplomatic demands, the security needs. Get the Americans out, our friends out, figure out—plan—what you would do and say if, say, next November there is a terror event on U.S. soil, and a group calling itself al Qaeda 2.0 claims responsibility, and within a few days it turns out they launched their adventure from a haven in Afghanistan.

Don’t fix on “perception.” Focus on that ignored thing, reality.

 

The Supreme Court just effectively overturned Roe vs. Wade with legal Calvinball

Ryan Cooper, National correspondent
Thu., September 2, 2021, 4:14 p.m.

·6 min read

The Supreme Court effectively overturned Roe vs. Wade with a 5-4 unsigned decision issued in the middle of the night Wednesday. The Texas state government created a legal end run around precedent to ban the vast majority of abortions in the state, and set up a massive incentive to suppress even the ones that are still technically legal. The court declined to stop it.

It's legal Calvinball — five ultra-reactionary justices, one of whom occupies a stolen seat and three of whom were appointed by a president who lost the popular vote — ignoring all precedent and basic constitutional mechanics to stuff through an incredibly unpopular right-wing attack on reproductive freedom. And the legal mechanism they countenanced is even worse than the effect on abortion rights.

Here's how the Texas law works. As Mark Joseph Stern explains at Slate, it was designed as a nakedly tendentious way to get around the entire American legal framework. It bans any abortion that happens once a fetal heartbeat can be detected (which typically happens at about six weeks), but forbids any state officials from enforcing the law.

Instead the law allows any random person to sue an abortion provider for $10,000 in civil court for providing an illegal abortion, or for aiding or abetting an illegal abortion (even if the person did not know their aid would be used for an illegal abortion, like a donation for instance), or for even intending to do so. If you post on Facebook that you're going to donate to post-heartbeat abortion funds in Texas, congratulations, Texas just put a $10,000 bounty on your head. There is no exception for rape or incest, though the law does say a rapist can't be the one to sue.

That structure thus takes advantage of the fact that federal courts aren't allowed to enjoin state ones to make it impossible to sue anyone to contest the law. It's like Republicans were reading Kafka's The Trial as an instruction manual.

Just the strict legal function of this law will make most abortions illegal. The length of pregnancy is typically calculated from the date of a woman's last period — meaning a woman "six weeks pregnant" has only really been pregnant for four weeks. Basically you have two weeks from a missed period to get in under the technical legal wire. Most people do not even realize they're pregnant at this point, or have trouble scraping up enough money or getting an appointment that fast, which is why about two-thirds of abortions happen after six weeks.

In practice this law will almost certainly destroy all abortion providers in Texas inside of a few months. It stipulates that if a bounty hunter wins in court, then the defendant has to pay both party's legal bills, and an abortion provider found guilty is shut down. But if the defendant prevails, the bounty hunter does not have to return the favor. It's practically an open invitation for any conservative with a bit of money to file endless lawsuits against all abortion providers, including every member of their staff, and knock them all out of business with legal fees and harassment. (The fact that the same trick could be done against literally anyone — like every Republican in the Texas legislature — does not seem to have occurred to the Texas GOP, at least not yet.)

Hey presto, abortion is effectively illegal in Texas. I had always figured that sooner or later Roe v. Wade was getting overturned by this court. But I did not think that they would do it through granting vigilantes and bounty hunters a wide-open route to file nuisance lawsuits by the millions. Basically Texas is saying "we're allowed to violate the Constitution, so long as we deputize private citizens to do it," and the Court is agreeing.

The precedent set here is incredibly alarming. Aside from the dozens of states that are already planning to ban abortion in the same fashion, the justices are telling conservatives they can pass basically any unconstitutional law they want, and "the Supreme Court will pretend to be unable to block them," as Adam Serwer writes at The Atlantic. And as The New York Times' Jamelle Bouie points out, this kind of private law is a disturbing echo of cases in the 1870s and 1880s in which the Supreme Court struck down laws protecting African-Americans' civil rights by pretending that Congress had no power to ban racist acts by individuals (up to and including mass murder). A key pillar of what would later become Jim Crow was white terrorists enforcing racial subordination outside of the formal legal system. Who knows what the court has unleashed now?

The way this decision was released is evidence of malign intent. Nobody put their name to the opinion because they know it is complete bad faith B.S. The fact that they quietly released it at midnight shows that they know a total abortion ban is hideously unpopular — polling at just 19 percent support according to Gallup.

In Calvinball, famously the rules are made up as you go along, and you can never play it the same way twice. (Apologies to Bill Watterson for soiling his whimsical creation.) It thus goes without saying that the hacks on the court will not allow liberal states to fight fire with fire — by mandating a coronavirus vaccine by putting a $10,000 bounty on the unvaccinated, for instance. That will be unconstitutional because, um, the Eighth Amendment? We'll get back to you.

Legally, this decision has all the legitimacy of a bucket of warm spit. Democrats would be equally justified in passing a law legalizing abortion, declaring Marbury vs. Madison wrongly decided, and instructing the federal bureaucracy to ignore any Supreme Court orders to the contrary. Or President Biden could declare this Supreme Court dissolved, recess-appoint a new one, and send in the Secret Service to change the locks on the court building. After all, it never says you can't do that in the Constitution.

Those would be pretty stark violations of traditional conceptions of precedent and the rule of law. But so is this decision from the Supreme Court (along with many others). Their power as an unelected super-legislature relies on everyone else agreeing to defer to the arbitrary decisions they force on us all.

Now, doing so would mean invalidating the few remaining shreds of positive decisions resulting from judicial fiat. But as we see today with abortion rights, those are vanishingly rare and are already in the process of being rolled back in any case. Better for constitutional rights to be protected by the legislature, which is much better-equipped to enforce them in any case. Time to put the Supreme Court back in its place.

Mark Levin: How many Anne Franks are in Afghanistan tonight?

'Can you hear the screams of the Afghans, America?'

By Angelica Stabile | Fox News

'Life, Liberty & Levin' host drags the Biden administration for those left behind in Afghanistan.

The Afghan people left behind are fighting to survive much like Jewish victims in Nazi Germany, "Life, Liberty & Levin" host Mark Levin compared Wednesday on "Hannity."

"How many Anne Franks are there tonight in Afghanistan?" he asked. "How many Anne Franks are hiding in cellars all across the country today? I want to talk about the people left behind, not the 124,000 who’ve been evacuated to safety. I want to talk about the millions who now have had genocide unleashed upon them."

Levin pointed out that the Afghans were living "mostly in peace" and safety before Joe Biden’s presidency with a "minimal American military footprint." 

Levin hit out against who he called "propagandists" in the administration including press secretaries Jen Psaki of the White House, Adm. John Kirby of the Pentagon, state department spokesman Ned Price as well as generals who he blasted for leaving American citizens in Afghanistan.

"No commander in chief has ever ordered any general to leave citizens behind," he roared. "What about these chi

"Instead, we hear that the American citizens didn’t act fast enough," he went on. "Instead, we hear, ‘this was a massive success…’ Instead, we hear, ‘we may in the future work with them against ISIS’ as if they’re different. It’s the Taliban that allowed al Qaeda to attack us on 9/11. The Taliban! They have our equipment. They have our people. They have our allies."

Levin intensely warned that the Taliban will threaten the U.S. while working alongside the Chinese, Russian and Iranian governments, pressing the fact that they are not to be trusted.

"Can you hear the screams of the people of Afghanistan, tonight?" he asked. "Can you hear the women being brutalized? Can you hear the bullets in the execution? Because it’s occurring under the cover of dark… while they’re celebrating at the state department and at the defense department and at the White House."

"I’ve never been more disgusted with my government and the top brass of the United States military than I am right now," he said. "Listen! They’re screaming! Do you hear them?"

 

The Secret Lives of Mosquitoes, the World’s Most Hated Insect

 

August 19th, 2021, 6:00AM / BY  

Cypress Hansen

Mosquitoes are more than blood-sucking menaces. They also pollinate flowers, have intricate sex lives and eat other disease-carrying mosquitoes. (Lawrence Reeves)

In the forests of the Eastern U.S. lurks a mosquito so large, it dwarfs nearly all of its 3,570 relatives. Buzzing through the trees during the day, her long legs trail beneath her as she sniffs out her next meal. When her antennae sense and lock onto her target, the monstrous mosquito extends her long, curved proboscis and inserts it into the soft center of a flower to slurp up the sweet nectar.

That’s right — this mosquito doesn’t drink human blood, and neither do many of the other species we are so quick to swat.

Thanks to its plant-based diet, this hefty insect — fittingly known as the elephant mosquito — has generally flown below our radar. Instead, we have long concerned ourselves with the three percent of mosquito species that infect us with zoonotic diseases like malaria, dengue fever and Zika virus. Make no mistake: our irritation with these insects is warranted. For humans, mosquitoes are the deadliest animals on Earth. But the long-legged, sugar-sipping elephant mosquito is one of many species that might be doing more good for humanity than bad.

Aside from the 100 or so species that commonly spread disease to humans, there are thousands more with fascinating behaviors and gorgeous bodies that we barely understand, yet we still call for their indiscriminate eradication. Must we also evict the magnificently iridescent mosquitoes whose larvae prey on dangerous species, or the ones that pollinate flowers at night, or the single species known to risk its life to protect its eggs from harm?

“We have been grossly underestimating the diversity of mosquitoes,” said Yvonne-Marie Linton, curator of the Smithsonian's National Mosquito Collection and research director at the Department of Defense’s Walter Reed Biosystematics Unit (WBRU). “The number of new species that we find everywhere we go is phenomenal.”

With the help of the largest mosquito collection on the planet, Linton recently released “Mosquitoes of the World” with her co-authors Richard Wilkerson and the late Daniel Strickman. The 1,300-page compendium highlights the diversity and importance of all mosquitoes, not only those feared by humans. Through this massive endeavor to expand our knowledge of mosquitoes, Linton’s team has uncovered the unexpected beauty, benefits and diversity of the world’s most hated insect.

Elephant mosquitoes are everything you’d never expect from a mosquito. Big and beautiful, they never suck our blood and their larvae prey on other dangerous species. (Walter Reed Biosystematics Unit, Smithsonian Institution. Top left: Lawrence Reeves)

Dressed to impress

As the elephant mosquito buzzes from flower to flower, its sapphire-blue and silver-striped body glints in the sunlight. Brilliant scales along its back and legs reflect the diverse palette of colors mosquitoes have evolved to wear. Some species match hues to blend in with their surroundings while others stand out in shimmering style. Their plumages range from iridescent violets and golden greens to brilliant matte orange and black and white polka dots. Many others, like tiger mosquitoes, don prison stripes which are thought to confuse predators and hosts by making it harder to visually lock on to their form.

Aside from the Asian tiger mosquito, a well-known carrier of at least 25 pathogens, Linton calls most of the dangerous species “brown blobs.”

“The mosquitoes that cause so many problems for humans are usually the boring-colored ones," she said. As curator of the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History’s 1.7 million mosquito specimens, Linton has spent years contributing to the WRBU’s online mosquito database, entering descriptions, disease associations and genetic identifiers for all known mosquito species.

Diversity among insects is immense and mosquitoes are no exception. They come in all shapes, colors and sizes, guided by sexual selection and the need to blend in or confuse predators. (Lawrence Reeves)

Scattered among the brown blobs are dozens of mosquitoes which have earned far more colorful descriptions from Linton. For example, she’s branded mosquitoes in the genus Sabethes as the “Hollywood showgirls of the mosquito world.”

One especially fabulous species, Sabethes cyaneus, is wrapped in violets and blues from head to toe. Both males and females possess elongated, feather-like scales on their second pair of legs, a look reminiscent of the fringed boots worn by the Dallas Cowboys cheerleaders. Upon their discovery, the purpose of these adornments perplexed researchers.

“There was just no immediate rationale as to why they would have these leg paddles,” said Linton. “These mosquitoes fly in tropical jungles and these paddles are not very aerodynamic — it didn’t seem to be an advantage.”

But in 1990, scientists shaved the legs of these mosquitoes and discovered that fringe plays a critical role in mate recognition. The females couldn’t care less about the presence or absence of the paddles on males, but when females lacked their fluffy legwarmers, the males refused to mate with them. Mosquito matchmaking, it seemed, was more complex than previously thought.

Looking for love

Mosquitoes are pretty good at proliferating when the weather is right. Anyone who’s visited Alaska in the summertime can attest to that. You wouldn’t expect the mosquito mating process to be particularly involved — and truthfully, most species are quick and dirty about it. But there are some exceptional species out there with dances, displays and positions worthy of a good romance novel.

While the high-pitched hum of a mosquito’s wings induces anxiety in most of us, it’s all love songs for elephant mosquitoes. Males and females are known to perfectly synchronize the tone of their buzzing within a matter of seconds by matching the frequency of their prospective mate’s wing beats. It’s thought that harmonized flying frequencies makes mating in mid-air easier, though more research is needed to be certain.

The bird-of-paradise of the mosquito world, Sabethes cyaneus performs a complex dance to attract mates. (James Gathany, CDC)

For S. cyaneus, a mate’s musical skills don’t matter as long as they can dance. When these insects decide to get down to business, they engage in a courtship as elaborate as their feathery physiques — and they almost always do it hanging upside-down.

Perched on the underside of a twig, a male begins by waving his feathered legs overhead at a nearby female. If she doesn’t fly off or kick him away with her hind legs, he waves a little faster, then flexes his standing legs and flicks his proboscis a few times

If dangling and dancing isn’t interesting enough, there are also male mosquitoes with enormous fluffy antennae for sniffing out far away females while others form dense swarms and mate as they fall through the air. And in a strangely Lolita-esque style, males of the New Zealand genus Opifex are known to patrol water pools, guarding and attending to growing pupae. They wait to impregnate the adult females as soon as, or even before, they completely emerge from their casing. “Those ones are like the sexual predators of the mosquito world,” said Linton.

Miniature helicopter moms

In forests, holes in tree trunks are a reliable water source for growing mosquito larvae year after year, but mosquitoes will deposit their broods in just about any pool of water they can find. Their eggs can be found in crab holes, bamboo nodes and in rainwater welled in the ridges of palm fronds, fruit husks and curled leaves on the forest floor. Anopheles gambiae, the major vector of malaria in Africa, often chooses muddy hoof prints.

When a female elephant mosquito is ready to lay her eggs, she will seek out a tree hole to deposit her clutch. In a style bound to make human mothers cringe, she deposits her eggs in mid-air by flinging them from her abdomen, one-by-one, into the water while she hovers outside the hole. This egg-catapulting behavior may serve to protect her from predators or any catty, dive-bombing mosquito moms that have already laid claim to the pool.

Once she has tossed her eggs, our mama mosquito flies off with nary a thought for the future of her young. This behavior is hardly unique — maternal care among mosquitoes is virtually unheard of. But there is at least one mosquito mom that breaks the mold: The hairy-lipped mosquito, Trichoprosopon digitatum.

A rarity among her kind, the hairy-lipped mosquito carefully guards her eggs from falling raindrops, predators and debris until they hatch. (Lawrence Reeves)

Floating on rainwater cupped by fruit husks left behind by monkeys, hairy-lipped mosquito eggs are “susceptible to being splashed onto the ground by a raindrop, or carried away if the husk overflows,” said Lary Reeves, an entomologist at the University of Florida who studies mosquito ecology. Reeves, who has studied T. digitatum in the Brazilian rain forest, said the mother mosquito braces herself above her brood and guards them fearlessly until they hatch, edging them away from incoming insects, water and debris.

“We went to collect adults of this species in Brazil and this mosquito did not want to leave its eggs,” he recalled. “It could have easily tried to save itself by flying away, but instead it just stayed there, trying to hold on as tightly as it could.”

Reeves said it’s tough to characterize this behavior without anthropomorphizing — assigning human-like qualities to — the mosquitoes. But he agrees egg-guarding “does give the impression that this mosquito is aware of the potential danger that's there for its young.”

While T. digitatum is likely acting out of pure instinct to procreate rather than tender motherly love, maternal care is a rare trait among mosquitoes and other flies. “Nothing surprises me anymore about the complexity of mosquito behaviors,” said Reeves. “They do a lot of weird and wild things.”

Feeding for a cause

When the eggs of an elephant mosquito hatch, they can grow far larger than most mosquito larvae, nearly the thickness of a pencil. Most larvae filter-feed the water for algae, detritus and other microorganisms. But elephant mosquito larvae are spiny, insatiable hunters. Fortunately for us, they readily munch on the wriggling young of other mosquitoes. This predatory nature has not gone unnoticed; elephant mosquitoes have been deployed as a bio-control method for disease vector mosquitoes in places like Texas, Vietnam, Uganda and Samoa.

Elephant mosquito larvae (dark red) readily feast on the young of other mosquitoes (tan, at bottom) at impressive rates. People have intentionally released them into rice fields and other breeding grounds to control malarial mosquito populations. (Lawrence Reeves)

“People have taken the most ferocious larval feeders and put them in rice fields to eliminate mosquitoes that bite humans,” said Linton. “They’re just massive, they decimate everything. One elephant mosquito larvae can eat 30 to 40 of the piddly little ones every day.” Their hearty diet as youngsters provides enough protein to last their entire adult life, so they have no need for a blood meal to lay healthy eggs.

There are dozens of species that, like the elephant mosquito and its close relatives, never drink blood as adults. But to tell the truth, most of them do. Humans aren’t always on the menu, though. Hematophagus, or blood-sucking, mosquitoes also feast on frogs, crocodiles, earthworms, armadillos, manatees and even mudskipper fish.

Recent research on fossilized mosquitoes suggests these insects were originally reptile feeders, sucking the cold blood of dinosaurs, Linton said. “In a lot of cases we're not their preferred host at all. We just happen to be there.” By our own nature, we also out-compete, over-harvest and crowd out lots of the animals that mosquitoes rely on, giving them no choice but to suck our blood instead.

Mosquitoes often take blood meals from more than one host species, making them an excellent vector for zoonotic diseases. They typically feed on reptiles (bottom right), amphibians (center) and mammals (left), but a few are known to prey on worms (top right) and even fish. (Lawrence Reeves)

When they’re not sucking blood for protein, mosquitoes get their energy from nectar, sap and fruit juice. Mosquitoes in the genus Malaya, however, poach their sugars from other insects. Using their antennae and short proboscis, they will stroke the faces of ants and aphids, causing them to regurgitate a sweet liquid called honeydew from their mouths.

“We don't know if these mosquitoes are mimicking hungry ants and ‘asking’ them for honeydew, or if they are accosting the ant and the ant’s defense is just giving it up,” said Reeves.

What we do know is that all mosquitoes rely on sugary plant liquids for most of their diet, and this tight relationship with plants could be far more important than we realize.

Working the night shift

Overshadowed by their vampiric tendencies, mosquitoes’ pollination duties are highly understudied. “There's a big bias, just because fewer people are looking at flowers after dark,” said Reeves. “I don't know that I've ever seen a mosquito at a flower during the day, but I've seen thousands on flowers at night.”

Mosquitoes are known pollinators, but which plants they visit and how effectively they disperse pollen relative to bees, butterflies and beetles is poorly understood. Studies have shown through flower-blocking experiments that when night-time pollinators are excluded, some flowers are less successful, that is, they tend to produce fewer viable seeds compared to flowers whose day-time pollinators are blocked out.

This, along with the sheer magnitude of mosquitoes found on flowers at night, suggests that nocturnal creatures like mosquitoes may be just as important for ecosystem functioning as the familiar pollinators we see during the day. Mosquitoes have a long way to go in terms of recognition, though. Even in the scientific community, they’re often excluded from pollinator studies. “Few people, even among entomologists, expect to see mosquitoes on flowers,” said Reeves.

Sugary plant liquids like nectar are the primary food source for all mosquitoes. Little is known about which plants they pollinate as they often visit flowers, like this mango blossom, at night. (Lawrence Reeves)

With their proboscises in every ecological pie, mosquitoes are intricately intertwined with countless plants, animals, microorganisms and pathogens, yet our perception of them remains narrowly focused on the itchy welts they leave and diseases they carry. If their enormous impact on humans alone is any indication of their relationships with other species, it would behoove us to focus more effort on understanding them in the context of their environments.

“We have so much more to learn,” said Linton. "People often assume we’ve figured mosquitoes out by now, but we are far from done.”

Indeed, the lesser-known mosquitoes out there — with their fancy colors, strange sex lives and variety of hosts — reflect a rich diversity that’s hard to ignore once you take a closer look. Chances are there's more than a few out there that could save lives, if only we could appreciate theirs.

Related stories:
Get to Know the Scientist in Charge of Smithsonian’s 1.9 Million Mosquitoes
How Museum Collections Advance Knowledge of Human Health
Eight of Nature’s Wildest Mating Rituals
Five Species to Wrap Up Invasive Species Week

Cypress Hansen is an intern in the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History’s Office of Communications and Public Affairs. She has also written for Knowable Magazine, Mercury News, Mongabay and Scientific American. Hansen recently graduated from the University of California, Santa Cruz with an MS in science communication. She also holds a BS in marine science from Eckerd College, in Saint Petersburg, Florida. You can find her at CypressWritesScience.com

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TERROR ATTACK AT KABUL AIRPORT

 

 

 

 

4 MARINES KILLED

TERROR AT KABUL AIRPORT
SUICIDE BOMB HITS CROWD

SECOND BLAST ROCKS HOTEL 

CASUALTY COUNT UNCLEAR
ISIS CLAIMS RESPONSIBILITY

Leon Sobel Report: "Biden Can't Lie His Way Out Of This One"

 

 

 

 

The Deer in Your Yard Are Here to Stay

The deer population of the eastern U.S. has exploded and cities are trying to keep it in check. But the options available to them are limited, and fraught.

• Amanda Kolson Hurley

A group of deer pass through a yard in New Hope, Pennsylvania. Photo by Mel Evans/AP.

A decade ago, deer were a rare sight on Staten Island. White-tailed deer are thought to have abandoned the island in the late 19^th century, pushed by human development to open land in nearby New Jersey. In 2008, the estimated deer population of the 60-square-mile borough of New York City was only 24.

Then the deer came back, swimming across the Arthur Kill and Raritan Bay from New Jersey in search of new habitat. And they reproduced—boy, did they reproduce. An aerial survey of the deer population in 2014 put it at 793. By 2017, the new estimate was between 1,918 and 2,188, an increase of 9,000 percent in just nine years.

To various degrees, towns and cities across the Northeast have been seeing an ongoing resurgence of deer populations in recent decades, as suburbanization patterns deepened and hunting practices faded. If you live anywhere outside of an urban downtown, you’ve probably noticed this trend yourself.

Deer are cute. We’ve all cried watching Bambi. So what’s the problem?

Well, there are a few. Hungry deer will eat (or trample) almost anything in a garden, becoming a pest for urban and suburban homeowners. Over-browsing by deer depletes the undergrowth of woodland, threatening birds’ habitat and the regeneration of trees. And when deer wander into the road, the results are not so cute. There are about 1.25 million collisions between cars and deer, elk, and moose annually in the United States, according to the insurer State Farm, and these cause around 150 human fatalities, and countless animal deaths, each year.

They also harbor the insects that carry Lyme Disease, which is on the rise: Reported cases have tripled since the early 1990s, and the true incidence may be 10 times higher, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The black-legged tick that carries Lyme is commonly called the deer tick, and deer are the main reproductive hosts for adult ticks, but ticks do not become infected with Lyme from the deer—that happens earlier in the tick’s life cycle, usually from feeding on white-footed mice. (Scientific opinions on the exact relationship between deer density and Lyme prevalence vary considerably.)

The explosion of deer across the eastern U.S. has prompted some cities and towns to cull them. Ann Arbor, Michigan, recently carried out a combined sharpshooting cull and sterilization of does (who give birth to one to three fawns a year during a life span of up to 10 years, which explains how their numbers increase so fast). Mount Lebanon, Pennsylvania, a Pittsburgh suburb, has tried archery culls and sharpshooting hunts, but as of October 2016, the town was still experiencing a spike in deer-vehicle collisions.

Other municipalities hope local hunters can help. Charlottesville, Virginia, is finalizing a new ordinance that will allow bow-hunting of deer on private land on lots of half an acre and up. Mike Murphy, an assistant city manager, says deer have been a regular topic of discussion among residents for the past several years.

“I think part of that is certainly about ornamental damage—people who are concerned about their yard or garden,” Murphy says. “Part of it is folks concerned about ticks and public health, and whether there’s a relationship to having deer in their yard. And of course there is some documentation that we were having increased collisions with deer, a traffic safety issue.”

A deer runs across the road in Pittsburg, New Hampshire. Photo by Jim Cole/AP.

Despite all the local efforts to bring deer numbers down, residents of deer-thronged neighborhoods shouldn’t expect things to change much any time soon. First, one reason the North American deer population is growing is the near-elimination of their main predators, wolves and cougars. Second, as suburban-style development continues to spread haphazardly across the land, deer aren’t crashing our party—we’re effectively inviting them over for hors d’oeuvres.

“Deer are what we consider an edge species,” says David Drake, a wildlife specialist at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. “Any place where you have two or more vegetation types come together—a wooded area and a residential neighborhood or field—that’s a vegetation edge. If you think about suburban areas, or any area developed for humans, there’s a lot of habitat fragmentation going on.”

Deer aren’t happy in the deep forest—most food in forests is too high for them to reach. They prefer “edge habitat”—the forest fringes, where trees give way to grasslands. Or, say, where a subdivision abuts the woods. The typical American suburb, with its mix of ornamental shrubs, lawns, and small patches of trees, makes a pretty ideal deer factory.

And grazing in suburban yards has another benefit for deer, Drake points out: Unlike in the real woods, homeowners typically replant the vegetation they eat, so they can return and eat it again. “You have this big conveyer belt of food in suburban areas,” Drake says.

As recreational hunting has declined sharply, overpopulation has become a serious issue for many towns, and none of the current non-lethal methods for managing deer come without significant drawbacks. Sterilization is judged to be cost-prohibitive by many municipalities that consider it (it can cost upwards of $2,500 per head). Birth-control vaccines require a second-year booster shot, so the teams administering them have to track the deer down again a year later. The vaccines are also less effective than sterilization, and not a whole lot cheaper.

Tony DeNicola knows the methods firsthand. DeNicola is the president of White Buffalo, a Connecticut nonprofit that many cities have contracted with to carry out deer culls and sterilization or birth-control programs. White Buffalo did the sharpshoot and sterilization in Ann Arbor and the archery cull and sharpshoot in Mount Lebanon. It just performed vasectomies on 720 bucks in Staten Island in an effort to curtail the deer boom there.

“The evolution of options had been brutally slow,” says DeNicola, a Ph.D-holding wildlife biologist who founded White Buffalo in 1995. “It’s just because it’s wildlife. There’s not a lot of resources available for R&D.” But a better vaccine would not necessarily be a silver bullet, he says.

“You start with the politics. First, you have to get over the problem of someone having the wherewithal to kill or impact deer. Then you go from that hurdle to, ‘Oh jeez, it’s really expensive.’ Then you hope you don’t get a lawsuit from a faction that creates further delays or obstacles for politicians, who don’t like friction.”

When culls are arranged, protests from animal rights advocates often follow. In January, two dozen protesters marched across the University of Michigan campus in Ann Arbor with “Stop the Shoot” signs. (The university had offered to help fund the cull and allowed sharpshooters on its property.) Other protests have erupted in Shaker Heights, Ohio (a Cleveland suburb), Canton, Massachusetts, near Boston, Washington, D.C., and elsewhere.  

In Canton, Massachusetts, demonstrators protest a planned deer hunt in the Blue Hills Reservation in 2015. Photo by Steven Senne/AP.

DeNicola says he’s been sued eight times and received death threats for his work. Animal-rights advocates aren’t the only ones who line up against deer culls: Sport hunters will sometimes object to the practice if they believe it will dramatically reduce the local deer population, he says.

Lethal culls in highly populated areas are tricky. Discharging firearms is dangerous in dense neighborhoods and illegal in many jurisdictions, like New York City. That leaves archery, which poses a very low risk to human bystanders. (“It’s literally been decades since there’s been a fatality from an archery incident” in Virginia, Charlottesville’s Murphy notes.) But bow hunting is difficult, and DeNicola is skeptical that about its effectiveness. “People think they can just have a bunch of bow hunters show up and manage deer. It’s a falsehood.” He also says that archery can end up being less humane than firearm hunts, since deer wounded with arrows may not die right away.

The Humane Society of the United States opposes lethal deer control as both inhumane and ineffective. Among its tips to prevent human-deer conflict are for gardeners to switch to deer-resistant plants and use repellents, and for cities and states to put up fences that stop deer from crossing roads. In Hastings-on-Hudson, New York, the society is piloting the birth control vaccine PZP-22 in a deer herd. A similar trial on Fire Island reduced deer numbers. Hastings officials don’t expect to see a measurable reduction in the herd’s size for five to 10 years. In the meantime, the treated deer will still be carrying ticks, gnawing shrubs, and wandering onto busy roads.

Weighing the complicated pros and cons of each measure, and the political blowback, causes most officials who contact him to reconsider, DeNicola says. “With ninety-five percent of them, once they realize the politics and the cost, it’s: ‘I guess I’ll just keep living with the deer.’”

Not everyone will be unhappy about that. For every Staten Island homeowner who gets annoyed when a deer crashes through his yard and takes down a tree, there’s another who feeds them out of his hand. How many deer are too many is largely in the eye of the beholder. Whatever their feelings about their hooved neighbors, Americans in deer-rich places will be coexisting with them for the foreseeable future. If you plant tulips (a deer favorite) in your garden, expect to have company.