| Mosquito Temporal range: Late Cretaceous (Cenomanian) – Recent
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| Aedes aegypti, vector of yellow fever | |
Scientific classification 
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| Domain: | Eukaryota |
| Kingdom: | Animalia |
| Phylum: | Arthropoda |
| Class: | Insecta |
| Order: | Diptera |
| Superfamily: | Culicoidea |
| Family: | Culicidae Meigen, 1818[1] |
| Subfamilies | |
| Diversity | |
| 112 genera | |
Mosquitoes, the Culicidae, are a family of small flies consisting of 3,600 species. The word mosquito (formed by mosca and diminutive -ito)[2] is Spanish and Portuguese for little fly.[3] Mosquitoes have a slender segmented body, one pair of wings, three pairs of long hair-like legs, and specialized, highly elongated, piercing-sucking mouthparts. All mosquitoes drink nectar from flowers; females of some species have in addition adapted to drink blood. The group diversified during the Cretaceous period. Evolutionary biologists view mosquitoes as micropredators, small animals that parasitise larger ones by drinking their blood without immediately killing them. Medical parasitologists view mosquitoes instead as vectors of disease, carrying protozoan parasites or bacterial or viral pathogens from one host to another.
The mosquito life cycle consists of four stages: egg, larva, pupa, and adult. Eggs are laid on the water surface; they hatch into motile larvae that feed on aquatic algae and organic material. These larvae are important food sources for many freshwater animals, such as dragonfly nymphs, many fish, and some birds. Adult females of many species have mouthparts adapted to pierce the skin of a host and feed on blood of a wide range of vertebrate hosts, and some invertebrates, primarily other arthropods. Some species only produce eggs after a blood meal.
The mosquito's saliva is transferred to the host during the bite, and can cause an itchy rash. In addition, blood-feeding species can ingest pathogens while biting, and transmit them to other hosts. Those species include vectors of parasitic diseases such as malaria and filariasis, and arboviral diseases such as yellow fever and dengue fever. By transmitting diseases, mosquitoes cause the deaths of over 725,000 people each year.
- ^ Harbach, Ralph (2 November 2008). "Family Culicidae Meigen, 1818". Mosquito Taxonomic Inventory. Archived from the original on 3 October 2022. Retrieved 15 March 2022., see also Valid Species List Archived 2022-03-15 at the Wayback Machine
- ^ "mosquito". Real Academia Española. Archived from the original on 24 July 2016. Retrieved 24 July 2016.
- ^ Brown, Lesley (1993). The New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary on Historical Principles. Oxford, England: Clarendon Press. ISBN 978-0-19-861271-1.