Male mosquitoes don’t want your blood, but they still find you very attractive

 

The whine of the mosquito is unpleasant and often inescapable outdoors on summer evenings. Mosquitoes track you down from tens of metres away by sensing carbon dioxide in the air you breathe out. Within seconds, they home in on exposed skin and feast on your blood with an array of specialized needles.

Only female mosquitoes drink blood, which is how they spread deadly diseases like dengue fever and malaria. Males mosquitoes are harmless, mostly feeding on nectar, but our new research confirms they are just as annoying as female mosquitoes.

Our study, published in the Journal of Medical Entomology, dispels a common misconception that male mosquitoes avoid people. In fact, male mosquitoes from at least one common species probably like you just as much as females do – but the reason for their fondness and the way they express it are very different.

The backyard and the laboratory

We used a simple experiment to test if male mosquitoes from the species Aedes aegypti, which spreads dengue, seek out people. We released mosquitoes into a large arena, the size of a suburban yard, and had willing subjects sit in a chair as bait. Cameras facing the subjects filmed mosquitoes as they flew nearby. We confirmed that male mosquitoes are indeed attracted to people.

Female mosquitoes are after your blood, but male mosquitoes just want to hang out. In our experiments, male mosquitoes continuously swarmed around people but rarely landed. By contrast, female mosquitoes land, drink their fill and then fly away to rest.

Image: James Gathany / Pixnio