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The preserved insects, from a cache of Lebanese resin, appear to be male but have mouth parts that are found only on modern female mosquitoes.
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The head of a male mosquito, preserved in amber from Lebanon, dating to the early Cretaceous period.Credit...Azar et al., Current Biology 2023
By Kate Golembiewski
Dec. 4, 2023
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Every single mosquito that’s ever bitten you has been female. For them, a meal of blood is the ultimate girl dinner. Only females have mouth parts capable of piercing skin. But insects found trapped in amber, described in a study published Monday in the journal Current Biology, suggest that male mosquitoes may have once drunk blood, too.
When small animals or plants get stuck in gooey tree resin, they can be preserved if the resin hardens into amber. “In Lebanon, I have found some 450 different outcrops of amber, which is a lot for a small country,” said Dany Azar, a paleontologist at the Nanjing Institute of Geology and Palaeontology and Lebanese University, and an author of the paper.
Lebanese amber is rich in preserved fossils, called inclusions, and dates to around 125 million years in the early Cretaceous period. In addition to being the age of the dinosaurs, it was also a time when flowering plants were becoming more widespread. Dr. Azar says he studies inclusions with the aim of understanding how flowering plants and pollinator insects have evolved together.
He collected the amber specimens in this study about 15 years ago in central Lebanon, but he thought they belonged to a group of insects that he didn’t focus on, so Dr. Azar didn’t prioritize them for study. But while polishing one of the specimens to a thin slice that could be examined under a microscope, he was taken aback.
