• Fondots@lemmy.world
    16·
    1 day ago

    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.

    • bedwyr@piefed.caEnglish
      13·
      2 days ago

      A mosquito doesn’t way anywhere near a gram let alone several. A penny is .9 grams for reference.

      • Fondots@lemmy.world
        5·
        1 day ago

        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.