Mosquitoes

😱 Mosquitoes love Kim Zarins. The insects’ preference for Zarins, an English professor at Sacramento State University, is so extreme that her 18-year-old son likes her to come outside with him because she serves as a decoy and “he knows he’ll be safe,” Zarins says.

😱 From up to 200 feet away, they follow the carbon dioxide plumes we exhale with each breath.

😱 The work shows, for the first time, that mosquitoes can discriminate between multiple people in a large, spacious arena the size of an ice-skating rink.

😱 “This just drives home the point that even in complex situations with multiple sources of odor, mosquitoes do seem to prefer some people over others,” Giraldo says.

😱 The mosquitoes were especially beguiled by carboxylic acids, a class of fatty acids found in human sweat whose scent is sometimes compared to rancid butter or cheese.

😱 To the researchers’ surprise, in some cases, washing increased the number of mosquito landings—indicating that soap amplified that person’s attractiveness to mosquitoes.

😱 Because humans are so important to the lifecycle of some mosquitoes (females need a blood meal before they can produce eggs), the wily insects have evolved redundancies in their people-detection mechanism. “They can’t rely on just one signal—so they have a really robust system for detecting a range of odors, which is really hard to profile,” De Obaldia says.

😱 Some species of mosquitoes, for example, have begun to feed earlier in the day to thwart the use of bed nets.

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/premium/article/mosquito-magnet-smell-repell