Villages on the east coast of the Kamchatka peninsula, in Russian Far-East experience scenes that seem only, can be in a movie. Instead of birds flying and filling the sky, it’s billions of mosquitoes flying and swirling into visible “tornadoes” looked like.
Some villages like Ust-Kamchatsk are used to being invaded by a large number of mosquitoes every summer. It is a normal phenomenon for these insects to swarm near water, but this year the number of insects is so much worse. It’s making them an even bigger nuisance than they usually are for the villagers. Even widow and door nets have been set up, the pesky buzzers found a way to get in through the smallest of cracks to get into people’s houses. Being outside is something that needs to be avoided where you need to deal with large swarms of mosquitoes that seem to reach the sky when seen from afar.
A resident in Ust-Kamchatsk, Maria Zubkova said, “We have always had large numbers of mosquitoes here in the summer, and we always will, but there are just too many of them this year.”
“They get into every crack, even if there are nets on the windows, they still manage to get through.” She added.
Videos of the phenomenon have gone viral on Russian social media and received worldwide attention. In most of the videos, they show these large whirlwinds visible from long distances, which wasn’t the case in past years.
Locals are used to mosquitoes and midges invading their villages for a few months every year, but few can remember such large numbers.
Getting through one of these living tornadoes will leave you fully covered in mosquitoes from head to toe, but experts say that there is nothing to worry about getting stung by them. Part of mosquitoes’ mating ritual, the tornadoes, where tens maybe even hundreds of thousands of mosquitoes swarm around one or more females trying to secure a spot close to her. Since male mosquitoes don’t sting, all you have to worry about is getting them off, as they can be very clingy.
Kamchatka, home to over 100 species of midges and mosquitoes, and yet entomologists have not determined which ones are most active this year yet they did assume that there are both blood-sucking species and harmless midges in these giant “tornadoes”.
Things are a little bit different in nearby villages like Klyuchi and Kozyrevsk where the villagers claim that the mosquitoes there are way more aggressive which they can sting through jeans and leather jackets.
Source: Oddity Central