Mosquitoes And Smell: Insect Finds Its Meals Through Smell

Dogs and mosquitoes have little in common, except perhaps, for their acute sense of smell. Before a mosquito even sets eyes on a new meal, it can smell a host's blood from across the room. 

Though it's taken quite a bit of time for researchers to figure out just how these blood suckers seek out their next target, new research suggests that insects sense of smell is probably the key. 

During the study, researchers tracked mosquito behavior under a variety of circumstances by watching them in a wind tunnel that served as a closed and controlled environment, releasing 20 mosquitoes into a chamber with a single black dot on the floor. 

"What's great about this wind tunnel is that it provided a nice control of wind conditions and the environment these mosquitoes are flying around in," Jeff Riffell, a biologist at the University of Washington and co-author of a new paper on mosquitoes' sense of smell, said in a news release. "We can really test different cues and the mosquito's response to them."

While mosquitoes would normally pay no attention to the aforementioned dot, the researchers also released bursts of CO2 into the chamber, making it seem like the breaths of an animal. That's when the mosquitoes began to make their way toward the dot, with some trying to land on it, as well.

"In a previous experiment with fruit flies, we found that exposure to an attractive odor led the animals to be more attracted to visual features," added Floris van Breugel, a postdoctoral scholar in Dickinson's lab and first author of the study. "This was a new finding for flies, and we suspected that mosquitoes would exhibit a similar behavior. That is, we predicted that when the mosquitoes were exposed to CO 2 , which is an indicator of a nearby host, they would also spend a lot of time hovering near high-contrast objects, such as a black object on a neutral background."

Now the researchers are working on how mosquito brains react to different smells in order to determine just what body odors might be triggering their heightened senses.

"A lot of papers have been trying to find these odor sources that could repel or attract mosquitoes," said Riffell. "What our research shows is that it's not one kind of odor or stimulus that's attracting mosquitoes, it's a real combination of cues."

More information regarding the findings can be seen via the journal Biology Letters. 

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