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Notes -
Why do mosquito bites itch?
Is it entirely accidental, as in, evolution only cared about whatever stuff mosquito inject acting as an effective anesthetic for the duration of the bite, not about what happens next? Or maybe it's beneficial for humans (makes us much more alert and aggressive towards further mosquitos) or maybe even individual mosquitos due to intra-species competition?
Mosquito bites transmit bacteria and such as well as mosquito saliva which triggers an intense and localized inflammation response. Same thing with ticks and other blood suckers.
These are substances that require some amount of time for the body to notice and react, which is why bites don't hurt immediately or even shortly after receiving them. The mosquito has already fed and gone by the time the bite starts swelling and itching.
O, tick bites are a great example because they do not itch pretty much at all (and don't swell at first either), while mosquito bites start itching within minutes. So it is possible to anesthetize the bite location without immediately causing an immune response: why don't mosquitos do that, do they simply not care (evolutionarily speaking) or maybe there's some non-obvious benefit to it?
Ticks will stay on your body for comparatively a much longer duration than mosquitoes. I don't see how there's any actual benefit from a mosquito having any kind of analgesic property when they'll finish sucking and fly off in seconds. The benefit to a tick is much more obvious.
Additionly, as someone in the American south and no stranger to "skeeters" and ticks, I don't know that I've ever had a mosquitoes bite become itchy as quickly as you describe.
I understand. To reiterate, my question was: do mosquito bites become itchy because the mosquito doesn't care what happens after it has fed, so whatever it injects is optimized for short term anesthetic and anticoagulant properties, which by default causes itchiness later? Or are mosquito bites especially itchy because there is in fact some benefit in that to mosquitos or humans?
To that I received several responses basically claiming that itchiness is inevitable, because scabs itch when healing, skin itches when pierced, an immune/inflammation reaction is produced in response to introduced bacteria and foreign proteins, and so on. However ticks provide an excellent counterexample: it turns that when it's important to pierce skin without causing neither pain nor follow-up itching for days, Nature finds ways to do so, despite all of the problems above.
So then back to my original question: if it is possible to be entirely non-itchy, are mosquitos itchy simply because they don't care, or are they especially itchy for some reason?
Well, yes, maybe not in a couple of minutes (it can be hard to determine when the bite itself occurred), but in 10-15 minutes for sure, based on the interval between me entering a mosquito infested area and realizing that I've been bitten in a bunch of places.
While a tick/mosquito is hooked up to you, its anticoagulant is not spreading under your skin -- when it pulls out, a little bit spreads from the wound site causing swelling/irritation. Neither creature 'cares' about this, because they are gone by then.
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