News > Young mosquitoes launch their heads to eat other mosquitoes

Young mosquitoes launch their heads to eat other mosquitoes

A kind of teenager mosquito can suddenly shoot its head forward from its body — stretching its neck into a skinny cord — to bite another youngster. And that’s just one of the ways young mosquitoes kill other mosquitoes, a new study shows.

Over decades, scientist-cinematographer Robert Hancock and colleagues have filmed attacks by these Psorophora ciliata and two other kinds of predatory mosquito larvae in unusual detail.