The mosquitos inside a tennis-court-sized cage didn’t carry the malaria parasite and couldn’t get at the people sleeping in surrounding pods, but could smell them.
Mosquitos know no borders. They can bite you in Canada and Cambodia. In some countries they are a nuisance but in Ethiopia they can be deadly – carrying malaria or zika. And not all people are bit in the same way. An ambitious field trial in Zambia investigated why mosquitoes seem to find some people more appetizing than others. This study may open the way so that new repellant can be made to mask the smell that mosquitos love, protecting children and everyone from annoying and deadly bites.
In the study, researchers invited volunteers into individual sleeping pods that were connected to a giant mosquito enclosure housing the mosquito Anopheles gambiae, which transmit deadly malaria.
Infrared cameras tracked the mozzies’ movements and found they were most attracted to people whose scents were “enriched for a class of molecules called airborne carboxylic acids, and also other compounds that are produced by the bacteria that live on our skin”, says biologist and study co-author Conor McMeniman.
The lead author is Diego Giraldo from Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore.
The findings could be used to develop more-effective repellents, he says, “but also potentially turn the mosquito’s sense of smell against them, by engineering synthetic blends to lure mosquitoes into traps for mass control purposes.”
