… it doesn’t offer much resistance, and the raindrop just barrels along with the mosquito suddenly on board as a passenger. But even in the worst case, where the mosquito gets slammed right between the wings-a dead-on collision, because the mosquito is so light compared to the heavy raindrop … The raindrop can set them rolling and pitching, but they recover quickly-within a hundredth of a second. They do get hit but usually off center, on their long gangly legs, which splay out in six directions. What he found is that most of the time anopheles mosquitoes don’t play dodgeball with the raindrops. (His video, by the way, is waiting for you below, so you can see what he saw for yourself.)
He published his findings in a 2012 paper that I’m going to describe here in “executive summary” form. That way he could watch them in super slow motion and figure out what they’re doing when they’re out in the rain. Well, in 2012 David Hu, a professor of mechanical engineering at Georgia Tech, became interested in this problem and decided to pelt some airborne laboratory mosquitoes with water droplets while filming them with a high-speed camera-4,000 to 6,000 frames a second instead of the usual 24.
Why not? Why aren’t the mosquitoes getting smooshed? How Mosquitoes Survive Raindrops
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