The next time you take a big whack at the bug nibbling on your arm, your leg or te back of your neck, consider how your life might look if you were a mosquito.

After spending half your short and brutish life in a swamp, slough or some other wretched sinkhole, you finally get a chance to break into the big-time world of flesh-and-blood action figures, and what happens? You get swatted away at every turn.

Worse, your physique goes through a radical transformation with every growth spurt from larva to pupa to full-figured adult. Talk about body-image issues.

Then there's the question of travel and romance. In your entire mosquito lifetime, you might not fly more than a mile from your birthplace. And even though you occupy a special niche at the bottom of the food chain, you'll probably never share a nice meal with a member of the opposite sex, because males dine mainly on nectar and females must have blood.

Finally, even though you've had a co-dependent relationship with human beings since the get-go, they'll never acknowledge it. Even in Alaska, where the grizzly is your only rival as champion of carnivorousness,the mosquito has been beaten out for the title of "state insect" by that dunderhead, the dragonfly.

It's no wonder you raise a welt on people's consciousness every chance you get.

A nemesis of humankind since the first hand slapped the first cheek, mosquitoes have bitten their way into the American experience as voraciously as anywhere else in the world.

In New Brunswick, French explorers of the 1600s named one heavily infested region "Cap des Maringouins" in tribute to the pests, and by 1704 it was showing up on English maps as Cape Mosquito.

An early settler in the region wrote in his journal that the only way to combat "the plague" was to cut the grass in the meadows and put smoke pots in the house- "an operation that would be more agreeable if it could be effected without smoking ourselves at the same time."

In Nova Scotia, according to the late newspaper columnist Norman Creighton, the bugs got so bad in the summer of 1795 that a visiting priest was called in to help. But after leading a procession into the marshes and sprinkling lots of holy water, he eventually gave up, announcing that "it was impossible to prevail over the mosquitoes, so great were the sins of the people..."

In Louisiana, Cajun storytellers recount tales of mosquitoes so big they've been known to kidnap babies and carry off oxen.

Tall tales notwithstanding, the mosquito does seem to have made much of the country all but uninhabitable in the early days. In light of this, one must regard window screens- introduced in the 1880s- as an invention at least as far-reaching as the locomotive.

Today, the chief means of self-protection against man's unbest friend is DEET, a chemical repellent developed by the Army after World War II and offered to civilians starting in the '50s and '60s.

Millions of bottles of the stuff are sold annually under brand names such as Off!, Cutter, Muskol, and Repel, with health authorities recommending solutions containing 30 percent DEET for adults and 10 percent for children.

Inventors have come up with numerous other ways of making skeeters skedaddle, including patches, wristbands, hearbal sprays, citronella candles, sonic blasters, bug zappers and "Mosquito Magnets," which attract the critters with bursts of warm carbon dioxide, then blow-dry them to death by the thousands in a net.

Some old-timers swear by sprigs of sagebrush, which can be crushed and rubbed on like lotion. Others tout garlic or bananas or cedar oil or even fabric softeners, all of which are of dubious value.

The latest buzz involves fabrics impregnated with repellent (so people don't have to apply the stuff to their skin) and products made with soy oil or lemon eucalyptus oil, which are said to be as effective as low concentrations of DEET- meaning they must be repplied every 90 minutes or so.

But few of the high-tech measures work as well as the old-fashioned, low-tech strategy of simply hunkering down and covering up, says Mike McGinnis, owner of Colorado Mosquito Control, a Broomfield-Colo.- based firm that supplies the materials and manpower for many community spraying programs.

"I try to stay inside at dawn and dusk (when mosquitoes are most active), but I'm usually out working," he says. "Even so, I'm in a truck with the windows rolled up and the air-conditioner on and wearing jeans and a loose-fitting shirt. If you have tight-fitting clothing, it ends up being like another layer of skin, and many mosquitoes can bite right through it."

The real reason why these little monsters are such a monumental pain, of course, is not the itching they cause, but the pathogens they carry.

The germs transmitted by mosquitoes have been implicated in countless deaths throughout modern history- most notably from yellow fever, which forced the French to quit trying to build a canal across Panama in the late 19th century and claimed more American lives than the enemy in the Spanish-American War.

This scourge largely evaporated after Army surgeon Walter Reed discovered it could be controlled by putting netting over people's living quarters and wiping out the mosquito's breeding grounds.

Now the virus spreading fear across the continent is West Nile, which is killing animals, birds, and people- with hundreds afflicted in Colorado alone.

It might be said that mosquitoes are being unfairly demonized in all the epidemic, since they are apparently the unwitting agents of infection. But that would be like saying bomber pilots are non-combatants because it's the explosives that do the damage.

As for the ecological role they play in pollinating plants and serving as sources of food for fish, birds, bats and other creatures, not all scientists believe the world would be worse off if all mosquitoes were suddenly wiped out.

"In my opinion, the small contributions they make to the food chain are absolutely overwhelmed by their capacity to transmit pathogens to humans and animals," says Barry Beaty, a Colorado State University virologist who has spent his career trying to eradicate these threats.

"Mosquitoes and their allies put billions of people at risk and cause hundreds of millions of infections and millions of deaths each year," he continued.

"The ecological systems of the New World certainly survived and flourished for millennia before the introduction of Aedes aegypti (the species that transmits yellow fever), and control efforts directed at Anopheles vectors of malaria did not perturb the ecosystems."

In short, Beaty suggests, if there is one organism that absolutely wouldn't be missed if it went extinct, it's the mosquito.