Jun 29 2010
Well, yes. That’s the impression people get when they hear me talk about ticks and mosquitoes.
I HATE mosquitoes.
My skin overreacts to mosquito bites which instantly become red, itchy welts. I steel myself not to scratch them but my guard is down while I’m asleep and I wake to discover I scratched them overnight. The bites are bigger and itchier than ever. Aaaaarrrggg!
Only female mosquitos bite us and they do it to get a blood meal so they can develop their eggs. While drinking our blood the little vampires inject us with their saliva which contains anticoagulant. That’s how they transfer disease. That’s how people catch malaria and how birds catch West Nile virus.
In the beginning of time mosquitos bit only birds but now they bite mammals as well. Why did they add mammals to the menu? Because we smell just as tasty.
Mosquitos use their antennae to smell and they can sense much more than we do. For starters, they can “smell” carbon dioxide (CO2), the gas birds and mammals exhale.
But there’s more to it than that. Last year researchers Walter Leal and Zain Syed of University of California, Davis identified the odor that when coupled with CO2 delivers the double-whammy, the odor that makes us irresistible.
“Nonanal is how they find us,” said Leal. “The antennae of the Culex quinquefasciatus are highly developed to detect even extremely low concentrations of nonanal.”
When Leal and Syed baited mosquito traps with CO2 and nonanal (pronounced NAWN-uh-nawl) it more than doubled the attraction of CO2 alone. This had to be painstaking work in more ways than one.
Now that they know what really attracts mosquitos, I hope they figure out how I can stop emitting it. In the meantime I’ll continue to hike with long pants and long sleeves in hot, humid weather – just to avoid being bitten.
Did I tell you I HATE mosquitoes?
(photo of a mosquito on a hollyhock from Wikimedia Commons. Click on the photo to see the original.)