AAs the weather starts to warm up this week, you may be tempted to go outside – but with the outdoors comes the possibility of being bitten by mosquitoes. And if you get a lot of mosquito bites, it could be because of the way you smell or the colors of the clothes you wear, recent research has found.
“If you think it’s a mosquito magnet, that’s probably the case,” Jeffrey Riffell, a biology professor at the University of Washington who studies mosquito sensory systems, said in a video on the website. university website released earlier this month. “Some individuals are bitten much more than others.”
Riffell has been working with a team of researchers to try to better understand how mosquitoes find food – male mosquitoes drink nectar from flowers for sugar, while female mosquitoes drink blood as a way to help lay eggs.
“Mosquitoes are remarkably good at trying to locate a person to drink their blood,” Riffell said in the video. “They are vampires and they are very good at what they do. Their eyes, their vision, their nose, everything about them is geared to find us and bite us.”
Riffell and his team found that female mosquitoes find humans by “following a trail of olfactory cues,” such as the chemicals that humans exhale from their skin and sweat and the carbon dioxide gas that humans exhale when they breathe, according to the university website.
Mosquitoes are also attracted to certain colors — they love red and black, Riffell said in the video. But mosquitoes tend to dislike white and green, Riffell added.
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“Unfortunately, they can learn. If you’re very attractive and they bite you and drink your blood, they’ll come back to you because they’ve learned that kind of positive association,” Riffell said in the video. “The good news is they can learn to avoid you, so if you try to slap them, they will learn that and avoid you for a bit.”
Mosquitoes can detect three different types of sugar sources, Melissa Leon Norena, a biology doctoral student at the University of Washington, said in the video. One such source is fruit, and researchers are trying to create the scent that attracts mosquitoes. If mosquitoes are attracted to this scent, researchers could mix it with a toxin that can kill the insects.
O Centers for Disease Control and Prevention called the mosquito “the deadliest animal in the world” because the insects can transmit diseases to humans, such as malaria, dengue fever, West Nile virus and Zika virus. Research has found that climate change has led to a increased risk of mosquito-borne diseases. Last week, the Southern Nevada Health District warned residents that the area was experiencing the highest level of mosquito activity in known history, with more than 3,000 mosquitoes testing positive for West Nile virus.
“The information that we’re developing and finding in the lab has real-world implications and can really help, I think, a lot of people in a lot of different parts of the world,” Riffell said in the video.
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This story originally appeared on Time.com read the full story
