I'm really starting to like the wind. In the "old days" it meant bumpy flights over the mountains, cancelled lessons by flight students, poorly tied-down aircraft getting bounced around on the ramp, endless worries for a flight school owner. Yet now, said flight school owner is living in Fairbanks, Alaska, home to 34 species of mosquitos, according to recent article in the Daily News Miner. A windy day is a welcome occurrence to me now; those little blood-sucking beasts, like new flight students, choose not to fly on windy days.
A different article in the same paper published a few days later (you gotta understand, this is a BIG topic of conversation here), quoted a biologist's estimate that there are 17 trillion mosquitoes in Alaska! Further, inquiring minds at the local University wanted to know things like: how does body mass of all Alaskan caribou compare against that of mosquitoes, and here is what they concluded:
...that all 950,000 Alaska caribou (which outnumber Alaskans) weigh about 231 million pounds.
Alaska is home to about 17,489,393,939,393 mosquitoes, minus the one you just slapped. Yes, that’s 17 trillion. At 0.0000055 pounds each, the combined weight of Alaska mosquitoes is about 96 million pounds.
So, in case you've been losing sleep wondering about this (as I did last night, due to 20-hours of daylight and slapping at the mosquitoes trying to share my bed), it seems there is NOT a greater weight of mosquitoes in Alaska than caribou.
May the wind blow all summer long!
A different article in the same paper published a few days later (you gotta understand, this is a BIG topic of conversation here), quoted a biologist's estimate that there are 17 trillion mosquitoes in Alaska! Further, inquiring minds at the local University wanted to know things like: how does body mass of all Alaskan caribou compare against that of mosquitoes, and here is what they concluded:
...that all 950,000 Alaska caribou (which outnumber Alaskans) weigh about 231 million pounds.
Alaska is home to about 17,489,393,939,393 mosquitoes, minus the one you just slapped. Yes, that’s 17 trillion. At 0.0000055 pounds each, the combined weight of Alaska mosquitoes is about 96 million pounds.
So, in case you've been losing sleep wondering about this (as I did last night, due to 20-hours of daylight and slapping at the mosquitoes trying to share my bed), it seems there is NOT a greater weight of mosquitoes in Alaska than caribou.
May the wind blow all summer long!
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