Researchers at the University of Washington used a high-tech wind tunnel built for mosquitoes to reveal how pests find humans, first detecting carbon dioxide from our breath and then zeroing in the color of the skin.
“Carbon dioxide turns on their visual system, and then they start looking for you,” Jeffrey rifflell, a professor of biology at the University of Washington, told geekwore. These data may lead to the emergence of new mosquito traps.
Martin Edwards, an entomologist and head of the biology department at mullenberg college, said the findings were “significant progress”. “This study is unique in rigorously testing the interaction between two different sensory inputs: carbon dioxide detection and vision.”
Riffer says mosquitoes can detect carbon dioxide from about 100 feet away and even further away. It is well known that they look for high contrast objects that appear darker against a brighter background.
Rivers and his colleagues tried to determine whether mosquitoes were also attracted to specific colors. For example, tsetse flies are attracted to blue, which leads to the use of blue traps to prevent disease causing pests.
The insect wind tunnel at the University of Washington was established to find out what mosquitoes like. The 7-foot-long instrument can analyze the flight patterns of up to 100 insects at the same time. Like the mosquito’s metaverse, it can display different colored spots on the floor and even make pests feel different odors, such as their favorite odor: carbon dioxide.
“It’s almost like playing Wii with mosquitoes,” Rivers said. “You can start playing this virtual reality game with them.”
Mosquito wind tunnel. (University of Washington photo)
The researchers tested about 12000 mosquitoes and recorded 1.3 million different flight tracks. These studies were conducted on Aedes aegypti, which transmits diseases such as dengue fever, Zika fever and yellow fever, and Anopheles stephensi, which transmits malaria.
According to some of the research methods published on Friday Nature Communications, these mosquitoes are red and orange in human skin – including a mosquito named “evil 45” (vile 45), which matches “the rotten orange color of people who use cheap tanning lotion.”
Mosquitoes are attracted to these colors only when they first smell carbon dioxide. Mosquitoes do not respond to green, purple, blue or white, although they prefer cyan.
Everyone’s skin looks the same to mosquitoes. Among people with all skin colors, orange and red are the main colors, “no matter what your skin color is, and no matter what your skin color is.”
“No one knows if mosquitoes can ‘sense’ what we think of as’ color, ‘” Edwards said. But mosquitoes “have extra vitality and determination about the wavelength of light reflected from human skin.” Edwards said mosquitoes respond to color only when exposed to carbon dioxide. “It’s intuitive – because mosquitoes usually don’t bite people who don’t breathe.”.
The researchers also evaluated mutant mosquitoes with impaired ability to detect carbon dioxide and found that they could not focus on red and orange, or mutant mosquitoes with impaired red and orange vision.
The findings of the study were supported by experiments with human subjects from different races who volunteered to sign and put their hands in a box full of mosquitoes.
These findings enrich people’s understanding of how mosquitoes find and bite humans.
Carbon dioxide is a remote trigger that activates the mosquito’s visual system. Riffel estimates that these pests will then be guided to look for human skin, which can be detected by color from 5 to 15 feet away. Mosquitoes can also sense body temperature and skin odor, which determines whether they will bite.
“This technique of combining senses is very old and may be the same as other mosquitoes,” said Edwards of rivers’s new research. “This study has a wide range of applications, including the design of better mosquito traps.”
The new study builds on another recent study on mosquito magnets. Mosquito magnets refer to people who are “very attractive” to insects. The prepress study, led by Rockefeller University researchers, concluded that these people had different skin odors.
Rivers pointed out that the military’s use of khaki in tropical environments can be attributed to mosquito control. Khaki minimizes contrast with the environment, while mosquitoes do not respond to its mixture of green, blue and white. Similarly, the military changed its dress shirt from dark blue to light blue more than 100 years ago, in part to prevent insects.
Meanwhile, riffer’s team is developing a better mosquito trap. “These traps haven’t changed in 100 years,” he said contemptuously. “They use a lot of white. Mosquitoes hate white.”
The team patched the colors and other aspects of the traps provided by the hardware store. In unpublished studies, their modifications increased mosquito capture rates by five to ten times.
The new study also involved researchers from the University of California, Santa Barbara and the University of Freiburg (Germany).