Asklemmy

43750 readers

1180 users here now

A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions

Search asklemmy 🔍

If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!

Open-ended question
Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
An actual topic of discussion

Looking for support?

Looking for a community?

Lemmyverse: community search
sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
[email protected]: a community for finding communities

~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_[email protected]~

founded 5 years ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

Mosquito splinters (lemmy.cafe)

submitted 10 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

12 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Just a random shower thought.

Mosquito's proboscis is sharp enough to penetrate your skin. So when you smack it while it is in the process of drawing your blood, isn't there a chance of its proboscis being forcefully jammed into your skin, leading to some sort of "splinter"? Or does it somehow loses its stiffness the moment it feels the impact?

I've never encountered nor heard of such occurrence in my lifetime of killing those buggers, but wondering if such a thing is even possible. If such could happen, I could only imagine the risk associated with having a piece of foreign organic matter being embed in the body

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 0 points 10 months ago (2 children)

Had to look up homeostasis... Seems like a big umbrella term for many different things. 🤷‍♂️ I am none the wiser after 30 seconds of skimming.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Homeostasis is a giant catch-all term for normalizing things in or about the body. In this context, something foreign is introduced to the body (thorn or the tattoo ink) which is affecting the "normal"(equalibrium) state of the body. The body will then do its best to return to this equilibrium, and in these cases, that involves expelling (thorn) or slowly removing (dye) the objects from the body.

I'm going off of memory, but homeostasis also covers our body temperature and chemicals. It's why medical personnel can take blood and learn about issues; there is an expected range for everything to be in. Homeostasis is just that over-all term for "things should be this way". There are dozens of equalizing processes under the term "homeostasis".

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago

Very interesting. Thank you for going into more detail for me! :-)

[–] [email protected] 0 points 10 months ago

To put it another way, the mosquito beak won’t stay in your skin for long. A 2 cm thorn that got much deeper and healed over still got pushed out.