Smell of CO2 Boosts Mosquitoes' Ability to Visually Track Targets
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From New Atlas
In order to better trap or evade malaria-carrying Aedes aegypti mosquitoes, it helps if we know more about the manner in which they track their victims. New research now indicates that it's a matter not just of smell, but also enhanced visual processing that's triggered by smell.
It's long been known that - among other things - mosquitoes are attracted to the odor of the carbon dioxide which we exhale. A team of Virginia Tech scientists, however, wondered if there was more to it than that. Led by Asst. Prof. Cli(C)ment Vinauger, they built a sort of "flight simulator" for mosquitoes in order to find out.
[...] "Analyzing how mosquitoes process information is crucial to figuring out how to create better baits and traps for mosquito control," says Vinauger. "My research aims at closing the key knowledge gaps in our understanding of the mechanisms that allow mosquitoes to be such efficient disease vectors and, more specifically, to identify and characterize factors that modulate their host-seeking behavior."
A paper on the research was recently published in the journal Current Biology.
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