We’ve figured out how mosquitos sense our warmth
The phrase "warm summer evenings" sounds like an offer of a lazy, peaceful, relaxing respite. Any peace, however, will almost certainly be temporary, interrupted by an annoying buzz that signals it's time to start swatting away and, if that doesn't work, spend the rest of the night scratching some itchy welts.
By the time you hear its buzz, the mosquito has already engaged in a multisensory program that started by picking up your scent and the increased levels of carbon dioxide coming from your breath. By the time it's close enough for you to hear it, it's picking a place to land on you based on the fact that your skin temperature is even warmer than the summer air.
Interfering with this multisensory program holds the potential to not only improve your enjoyment of summer evenings; it could play a major role in limiting a variety of insect borne diseases that collectively kill millions of people each year and exact a staggering toll beyond that. But to interfere with the system, we have to understand it. And a key step toward that has now been provided by the identification of the protein that lets the mosquito sense that we're warmer than the environment. Unfortunately, that knowledge has enabled us to confirm that wiping out the heat-sensing part of the system is unlikely to protect us.
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