Splish Splat? Why Raindrops Don’t Kill Mosquitoes : NPR
“Hitting a mosquito with a raindrop is a difficult experiment,” he says. “The first thing we did was drop small drops from the third floor story of our building onto a container of mosquitoes, and you can imagine that didn’t go very well. It’s kind of like playing the worst game of darts you can imagine.”
So the team took the experiment inside. They fired jets of water drops at the mosquitoes and recorded the results with a super-high-speed video camera. They found that mosquitoes don’t actually dodge raindrops — they hitch a ride.
“So as the raindrop falls, rather than resisting the raindrop, they basically join together kind of like a stowaway on this comet,” Hu says. “So as a result they get very, very little force.”
To them it’s like getting hit with a feather. They ride the drop for about a thousandth of a second until their wings catch the wind like little kites, and tear the mosquito away from the drop. The mosquitoes don’t seem any the worse for wear.