Do you think that mosquitoes prefer to bite some people more over others?
Studies have suggested that a number of factors can attract mosquitoes to us like the body odour, body colour, skin temperature and texture, microbes living on the skin, pregnancy status, carbon dioxide exhaled by humans erc.
When female mosquitoes look for a human to bite, they smell a unique cocktail of body odours that we emit into the air. These odours then stimulate receptors in the mosquitoes’ antenna.
#source_of_study
- Margaret Herre, Olivia V. Goldman, Tzu-Chiao Lu, Gabriela Caballero-Vidal, Yanyan Qi, Zachary N. Gilbert, Zhongyan Gong, Takeshi Morita, Saher Rahiel, Majid Ghaninia, Rickard Ignell, Benjamin J. Matthews, Hongjie Li, Leslie B. Vosshall, Meg A. Younger. Non-canonical odor coding in the mosquito. Cell, 2022; 185 (17): 3104 DOI: 10.1016/j.cell.2022.07.024
- Cell Press. “Mosquitoes have neuronal fail-safes to make sure they can always smell humans.” ScienceDaily. ScienceDaily, 18 August 2022. <www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2022/08/220818122351.htm
- Joshua I. Raji, Nadia Melo, John S. Castillo, Sheyla Gonzalez, Valeria Saldana, Marcus C. Stensmyr, Matthew DeGennaro. Aedes aegypti Mosquitoes Detect Acidic Volatiles Found in Human Odor Using the IR8a Pathway. Current Biology, 2019; DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2019.02.045
- Cell Press. “How mosquitoes smell human sweat (and new ways to stop them).” ScienceDaily. ScienceDaily, 28 March 2019. <www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/03/190328112541.htm>.