4 Reasons Mosquitos Will Be Terrifying This Summer

4 There's Going to Be a Shit-Ton of Them

Thanks to the weather being pretty well fucked all around, we're seeing a crushing combination of extreme heat and rainfall that's shaping up to make 2013 the banner year for mosquito invasion.

Wichita, Kansas, has already seen a 227 percent jump in their mosquito population, and over in central New York, they're expecting a surge in the repellent airborne disease fairies as soon as the summer heat kicks in. Mobile County recently had a chicken test positive for mosquito-borne equine encephalitis (because Alabama is in the habit of testing chickens for such things), and the Boston area just found its first West Nile-carrying mosquito. So we're off to an itchy start already.

3 They Are Becoming Much More Dangerous

The Asian tiger mosquito, currently found in 27 U.S. states and counting, can put you in a wicked coma while unleashing a hellstorm of nightmare diseases including West Nile fever, yellow fever, the Chikungunya virus, two types of encephalitis, and dengue fever. To be clear, none of those fevers are the kind that make you win dance competitions.

They hunt continuously throughout the day and are especially aggressive during full moons, because apparently they are goddamned werewolves. Back in 2005, they infected over 250,000 people on the French island of La Reunion, killing almost 300. And now they're spread over half of the U.S. in one of the biggest mosquito breeding seasons in recent history. To top things off, researchers have observed these horrors breeding in pools of moisture the size of a soda bottle cap. So good luck stepping outside in anything less than a Kevlar bodysuit.

2 They Are Getting Bigger

We don't mean marginally bigger, we mean "20 times the size of regular mosquitoes" bigger.

These massive bastards, called Gallinippers, have started showing up in Florida and are roughly the size of a quarter, which means if they bite you, you'll probably need a freaking tourniquet.

Like an ancient curse, they had apparently been lying dormant for years, until the recent hurricane weather set them loose on the peninsula. Luckily, Gallinippers don't seem to carry any viruses that we know of, but their dagger-faces can apparently stab right through your fucking clothing. This makes Gallinippers one of the most compelling arguments in history for never going outside ever again.

1 The Experts Are Clearly Insane

They say you can tell a lot about a particular subject simply by looking at the people who study it. So let's do that:

Meet Leslie Vosshall of New York's Rockefeller University, who spends every day studying mosquitoes -- an occupation she recently insisted to CBS News was totally "not crazy." To prove this, she shoved her arm into a box full of mosquitoes to feed them:

And yes, Vosshall does this on a daily basis. Note the horrified look on the reporter's face as she realizes she is locked in a room with a mad scientist and thousands of mosquitoes:

Vosshall describes mosquitoes as "beautiful" creatures that we are fighting a losing war against. And if you think this is just one crazy lady that everyone is too scared to force into retirement, let us now direct your attention to Derek Sikes, the resident mosquito wrangler at the University of Alaska's Museum of the North, who is literally doing the exact same thing -- using his own arm to feed his collection of the pestilent insects.

So apparently, the only people qualified to be mosquito experts are those who have clearly been touched by the darkness. This isn't even a new development, because back in the 1970s, another mosquito expert conducted an experiment wherein he allowed the virulent little bastards to bite him 435 times in the space of five minutes in order to calculate how long it would take a swarm of them to kill a human being.

The answer is three hours. Have a great summer, everyone!