Original sentence: Mosquitoes poke the skin with their straw-like mouth and sip blood.
Shortened sentence: Mosquitoes poke the skin with a straw mouth and drink blood.
How I changed it (step by step):
- I replaced "their straw-like mouth" with the shorter phrase "a straw mouth." That removes extra words and the hyphen.
- I changed "sip" to "drink" so the verb matches the plural subject and keeps the sentence natural.
Character counts: original = 67 characters; new = 60 characters. That makes the new sentence exactly 7 characters shorter.