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Relevant: https://what-if.xkcd.com/98/
How about wearing a gel patch that calls the mosquitoes attention and then glues their needle mouth shut when the gel reacts to their saliva?
If it's high enough to kill a mosquito it's high enough to kill you.
In a recent article on Popular Science, entomologist Coby Schal, from North Carolina State University, pointed out that a human who had knocked back 10 drinks might have a blood alcohol level of 0.2%. But if the mosquito drank that person’s blood, the effects would be negligible – the mosquito is drinking such minute amounts that it’s the equivalent of diluting those drinks to 1/25th of their strength.
Just kind of thinking this through
EDIT: my math is wrong. I think I didn't move a decimal point or missed a metric prefix somewhere, don't have time to go through and correct myself right now, but go ahead and double check that.
A typical beer is around 5%, so about 25x higher than the concentration in your blood if you're at .2
A Google search tells me a mosquito drinks about .001 to .01 milliliters of blood per meal, let's just go with the higher number. Just gonna assume the density of blood is close enough to water which is a nice 1:1 conversion, so that's about .01g of blood.
A mosquito weighs somewhere in the neighborhood of 2-3grams
So after eating, a mosquito has drank about 1/200 to 1/300 of it's body weight in blood.
Gonna mix units now, sorry science people.
1 pint weighs around 1lb. If you weigh about 200lbs, and have one beer, you've drank about that same ratio of beer to your body weight in terms of just how much liquid youve drank.
But again, the concentration of alcohol in a beer is much higher than the concentration in your blood.
So 1 mosquito bite is roughly the same in terms of volume to one beer, but in terms of alcohol content, it would be more like 1/25th of a beer.
So if a mosquito really gorged itself and drank 25x the normal amount of blood at once, it might start feeling a tiny buzz, but that might just be the fact that it's a mosquito (because they buzz, get it?)
So that's sort of drinking a whole case of beer but only one of them actually had alcohol.
If you're a hardcore alcoholic you might be able to double that BAC to about .4%, which is about where most people would be unconscious and possibly have some significant medical complications.
But that would still only get the mosquito to about 2 beers worth of alcohol if they drank way more than they normally would in one meal.
This is all assuming mosquitoes process alcohol similarly to us, things don't always scale up and down so nicely and mosquitoes are of course different animals than humans, so that could throw things off quite a bit.
A mosquito doesn't way anywhere near a gram let alone several. A penny is .9 grams for reference.
You are right, I admit that I'm Americans so I'm used to thinking in football fields and bananas as my units, so grams don't inherently mean much to my brain. Not sure if Google steered me wrong with the weight of mosquitoes or if I missed a metric prefix or didn't move a decimal point somewhere. Don't have time to go back and fix my math right now but I did throw a little disclaimer in my comment. I'll try to fix that later.
Smoke more weed. You'll think in grams constantly
Yep. 0.0025 grams.
Thanks!
If its high enough to kill a mosquito you would already be dead.
So you’re saying it’s dangerous for humans to bite drunk mosquitoes?
I wish but its basically a drop in the ocean. That's the problem with dilution.
How many drunk mosquitoes does it take to become dangerous to humans?
OK let's see the math. If a drunk mosquito is .20 and the dilution is 2.5microliter. OK let's just say its more than 1000000 because that's 250ml. Which is equivalent to 5.6 shots.
What if you drink homeopathic beer? Then it would get stronger the more it is diluted. Or something (I never really understood homeopathy)
Thanks for the audible breath out my nostrils when I read this
Its a win-win scenario then!
I saw this asked on reddit at one point and I don't remember the exact number, but I think it was a couple of dozen times above what would kill a human
He died so the rest of us could live.
Ok, now I need to know how much weed I'd have to smoke to knock out a mosquito.
Don't need to kill them, just keep em mellow enough to stop being bitey.
You'd give them the munchies and make it worse!
How much brownies do I gotta eat so the mosquitos will be full after biting me
Better yet, how much fly agaric do I need to eat to get the mosquitoes totally fucked up if they bite me?
I don't have a researched answer, but the reason breastfeeding women can still drink is because breast milk also shares the blood alcohol level so when Mom is too drunk to drive, baby is drinking alcoholic milk with a percentage ~0.08%; for reference non alcoholic beer can be up to 0.5% and alcoholic beer is generally anywhere between 2.5-10%.
All that to say that idk anything about mosquito physiology but with arbitrary assumptions of roughly equal alcohol tolerances between humans and mosquitos, and with a human blood alcohol limit of ~0.4% before the human dies of alcohol, those mosquitoes are sipping on nonalcoholic beer no matter how drunk you get. Unless they have abnormally low tolerance, and a quick Google search doesn't suggest they do, humans can't raise their blood alcohol enough to impair mosquitos.
this post was submitted on 29 Aug 2026
132 points (100.0% liked)
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