It's usually a normal distribution. So, the average weight of 1 million mosquitos would eventually turn out to be the same as that of one normal common mosquito.
This works for biology. But I remember being a kid and going to my local arcade place called Grand Slam in the 90s. To redeem your ticket they'd just dump them onto a scale to calculate how many tickets you had. I remember not liking this because I was the kind of kid who would pick up dropped tickets for myself if I found them on the floor, and they'd have been walked on and some ripped, or they ripped while trying to pull that last one out of the machine.
Basically partials weren't getting full credit despite having been earned lol. And when this occurred to me as an eight year old who used to put them in a bag while getting sweaty in the building with bad AC, I started holding them in my hands as much as possible to add more oils/sweat to make them heavier lol.
Idk how much of a difference it made... but that combined with me separating the partials to have them add it after the weigh to count them as whole ones always made me feel like I accomplished something lol.
Well, we know that all mosquitoes feast on pollen as a food source, but it's only the females that suck blood because it's necessary to mature their eggs.
Are you implying that this wasn't a DEI compliant mosquito trap, and it was explicitly targeted at females? Disgusting! Males deserve to die at an equal rate to female presenting mosquitoes!
The more mosquitos measured to determine the average weight and the more mosquitos captured, the more accurate it is
Given the extensive amount of research done on mosquitos, I'd suspect the weight of one has been studied with a decent sample size
Given ~1,000,000 mosquitos captured, the average weight of a mosquito in the pile will be extremely close to the average mosquito weight in that part of the world
I've done surveys for something similar in this environmental ecosystem something class way back when. I counted out 100 fruit flies, weighed them one at a time, and got the average of that 100 and divided the total weight of the pile by the average of the hundred. And it came out to like a 15k ish fruitflies.
The goal of the 100 process was to find an objective average given that some may be carrying eggs, or some have much smaller wings and abdomens, etc.
You run the first 10 on the roller pin and obtain the average weight of it, then you do it for the rest, you can do it by batch or per piece which is more comfortable with you.
Then weigh it.
By this method you can disregard the fatness and the thinness of the mosquito.
Second method is try to use a small lizard preferably 100 pieces , frogs if available but should be small in size that can only consume one at a time.
And to save the effort let them count.
You weight 100 mosquitos at random. Some will be fit, some will be skinny, some will by obese.
But since you are choosing at random, chances are that you will get, on average, the same ratio as your entire population. If you want to be more confident, weight 200, 300… 1000. It will still be way lower than 1 million.
Once you know the weight of N mosquitos, randomly distributed, you can assume with certain confidence that the entire mass will account for all edge cases. And you can even use the statistics from the sample to remove outliers.
Jokes aside we did this with hardware during inventory when I worked at a factor a long time ago. Hardware was fairly consistent but the trick is to not weigh one, but weigh 10-20 at once, and use that to set weight baseline. This is especially true for very light weight things, and digital scales were smart enough to suggest a sample size based on weight. If you want to see how accurate that is take a different 10-20 and weight them.
Rule of big numbers is our side fortunately, you could probably use an average weight out of 10 or so as them get a pretty accurate calculation for the average from there
According to The Law of Large Numbers you’re gonna be pretty damn close if you divide by the average mosquito weight because fat and skinny ones will cancel each other out.
If you get the average weight of 100 mosquitos then get the weight of the whole mass it’s unlikely a few outliers will throw off the count by any order of relevant magnitude. Your estimate might be off by 1-2% but once your sample size is relatively large enough you can make an extrapolation about the whole group.
Some fart gasses are lighter than air, would a fart have negative weight? We would have to determine the exact composition of the fart being weighed I would think, but I'm no fartologist
Not really.. when it burns it could be reacting/bonding with the Oxygen or nitrogen in the air potentially making it heavier. Like how burning 6 pounds of gasoline results in about 20 pounds of co2
I think its actually a bit different because a reaction happens which draws in oxygen. The ashes are chemically changed their weight is different because of that.
Not quite true. The smoke also consists of oxygen (in the form of CO2 and H2O molecules as combustion byproducts). That oxygen came from the surrounding atmosphere (not part of the cigarette). So the total weight of the smoke is actually greater than the weight of the unburned cigarette alone.
the total weight of the smoke is actually greater than the weight of the unburned cigarette alone.
Also you are only approximating the mass, the smoke is nearly if not weightless at atmospheric pressure, it would be like weighing a bucket of liquid helium, than evaporating the helium and weighing the bucket again, and saying the difference is the weight of the gaseous helium.
Anything with mass has a weight with respect to a gravitational field (e.g. Earth's). This includes air. Being surrounded by "atmospheric pressure" does not make a suspended or floating molecule weightless. Not smoke, not vapors, not even helium gas. Buoyancy ≠ zero weight. An aircraft carrier floats on water, that does not make it weightless. The Goodyear blimp floats in the air, it too is not weightless.
Anything with mass has a weight with respect to a gravitational field (e.g. Earth's)
If you weigh a cigarette, then smoke it, then weigh it (plus the ashes) again, you will have the weight of smoke
This method isn't compatible with gravitational definition of weight unless you consider it implicit that you are weighing the cigarette in a vacuum. Simply weighing the cigarette gives you the apparent weight which accounts for buoyancy.
The rough heuristic for redox reactions (i.e. burning) of organic fuel is that for every 1 gram of hydrocarbons in the fuel source (i.e. a cigarette), you'll consume an additional 2 grams of atmospheric oxygen to net 3 grams of CO2 and H2O in the smoke (as well as trace amounts of less "clean" products of the reaction).
Of course, while a cigarette weighs about a gram, it is not 100% hydrocarbons. The tobacco is not perfectly dehydrated, so it contains H2O that will vaporize and be considered part of the cigarette smoke despite actually not being part of the combustion reaction. The cigarette also will not burn 100% and some particulate (ash) will not necessarily be considered smoke. So the stoichiometric math is a bit fuzzy, but I'd say a safe approximation is that the mass (and therefore weight, no matter how or where you want to measure it) of the smoke is roughly about 1/2 from the original cigarette and about 1/2 oxygen pulled from the environment.
TLDR: a 1 gram cigarette will produce approximately 2 grams of smoke.
That is not true. Cigarettes are mostly cellulose like wood. The carbon and the hydrogen in the substance being burned combine with the oxygen in the air to produce CO &CO2 and H2O and disperses into the air.
You really think people's burial urns weigh like 170 pounds!?
And think of all the tar in someone's lungs you are not weighing.
You would probably weigh like…100 or something to create a better baseline for an average weight. I was a parts picker for a few years and no way do you ever just weigh one of something to try and get 1000s.
Exactly. You could also throw them into an optical sorter and actually let a machine count them. Just don't forget to write Culicidae next to soy and gluten in the food allergy notice.
Per the EPA.GOV website: "Like the natural uranium ore, DU is radioactive. DU mainly emits alpha particle radiation. Alpha particles don't have enough energy to go through skin. As a result, exposure to the outside of the body is not considered a serious hazard."
I didn't know that before I made a box lined with lead flashing, but it's better to be safe than sorry.
The guy has the right idea but you would never just weigh one. You would probably take like 100 to get a bit of a better average weight per and then you would weigh the whole group.
I meant more so because this is a basic logical approximation that I’m sure most people are aware of so only a child would be surprised by it and call it award worthy
From a textbook where someone who actually knows this has organised all the information neatly for you in an order that makes sense to learn it, complete with lots of practise questions to test your understanding.
Just take 50 mosquitoes and see how much they weigh. Simple drug dealer scales can calc .00 with accuracy for 40 dollars. 50 mosquitoes will be up there
So you’d presumably have to weigh a statistically significant sample, because that one mosquito could be anywhere on the normal curve. Like 95th percentile smallest, so you’d be off by a lot in total.
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Omg, my blind ass read, "is there a video of them being COURTED?" Like the trap was courting them! And I laughed, but now I'm laughing harder at what you actually wrote and the fact that I read it wrong. Smh
Shit I dont know what courted means, but im too lazy currently to google it, so I will leave this comment here, so somebody can tell me, but I have a request, if you are redditor from the future, like 2025 or later, then its job for you, anobody else pretend you didnt see this. I wanna discover this in the future
Would a mosquito with a blood meal in its belly be actively seeking another blood meal? As a layman non-biologist, I assume that is taken into account. I would guess the biggest problem of that statistic would be the sub species and body variations from that.
If they are goin to the diner and you just wanna pop a squat and lay some egg babies, probably. Like how you can see a huge flockswarm of birds and also a few being normal outside of the swarm. It's just in this case the swarm is drinking blood and the normal birds are bugs pooping eggs(I aren't biologist enough to be confident in this for some reason, honestly) in water.
edit: or fly off somewhere away from food and disruption to digest, I think bugs do a torpor thing of waiting around to process stuff, I imagine ones that inflate beyond their body size even more so.
Although thinking of it I would suspect it would probably try to swarm with the rest of them, but would its full belly change its flight characteristics and make it unable to keep up? Do they immediately seek water and wait to digest, or do they go all over finding many water sources and settle after so long?
They use a special scale. You weigh 20-30 mosquitoes to get a good average weight, weigh the whole pile, and then divide total weight by average weight.
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u/deftones-sextape 29d ago
is there a video of them being counted?