Dire mosquitoes are monstrous insects that can be as big as a horse, although their slender bodies and limbs make them far lighter. A female dire mosquito looks just like an ordinary blood-sucking mosquito apart from the size, with a body length from 9 to 12 feet. A male dire mosquito is about two-thirds that size, averaging a little over 7 feet, and unlike natural mosquitoes are active predators armed with slicing claws on their front legs.
 A dire mosquito larva is an aquatic insect roughly the size of a human common folk call a wriggler. Wrigglers are quite different from normal mosquito larvae. They resemble hairy caterpillars with broad heads, long hairy mandibles for biting prey, and a snorkel-like tube at the tip of their tails for breathing air. Wrigglers are flesh-eaters who actively hunt for food and can swallow opponents up to the size of a halfling whole.
 Deadly Swarms. Dire mosquitoes congregate in swarms that can number from as little as four up to a couple of score. Both males and females flock together. The males fearlessly defend the females, and fight to the death whenever anything threatens them. Female dire mosquitoes use lancet-like mouthparts to drain the blood of warm-blooded creatures, homing in on the scent of their victims' breath or body. Once a female has drank her full she flies off to rests until her eggs are ready to lay.
 Aquatic Breeders. Dire mosquitoes are commonest in hot, humid areas with abundant still water such as jungle pools or tropical swamps. These insects need water for their eggs and young to develop so are never encountered in arid areas such as deserts. A single wriggler can grow in as little as a hogshead of water. The water doesn't have to be fresh or clean as long as it isn't salty. Once a female dire mosquito has gorged herself on blood she produces 10 to 30 eggs. Unlike normal mosquitoes, female dire mosquitoes have can live for years and produce multiple clutches, laying up to 300 eggs in their lifetime.
 A dire mosquito egg ranges from the size of a baseball and a grapefruit. New hatched wrigglers are only 8 to 12 inches long but grow rapidly if well fed in warm water. A hungry wriggler will attack anything up to its own size that isn't another wriggler that matches it in size (they have no compunction against cannibalizing wrigglers smaller than they are). They instinctively flee from any creature larger than themselves, so adult humans are not at risk of attack unless the wriggler is almost fully grown at roughly 5 feet long.


(Monster designed by Casimir Liber and Cleon on Enworld.org's General Monster Talk Creature Catalog Forum; originally appeared in Polyhedron Magazine #67 (January 1992) with a credit to Jeffrey Morris in "Monsters - by Network Members.")