(July 16, 2015) The
itchy marks left by the punctured bite of a mosquito are more than pesky,
unwelcomed mementos of a day at the lake.
These aggravating bites can also be conduits for hitchhiking
pathogens to worm their way into our bodies. Mosquitoes spread malaria, dengue,
yellow fever and West Nile virus, among others. As the bloodsucking insects
evolve to resist our best pesticides, mosquito control may shift more to
understanding how the mosquitoes find a tasty — and unsuspecting — human host.
A team of biologists from the University of Washington and
the California Institute of Technology has cracked the cues mosquitoes use to
find us. As they report in a paper published July 16 in Current Biology, the
minute insects employ a razor-sharp sense of smell to tip them off that a
warm-blooded meal is nearby, and then use vision and other senses to hone in on
the feast.
“Very little was known about what a host looks like to the
mosquito and how a mosquito decides where to land and begin to feed,” said UW
biologist Jeff Riffell, co-author on the paper and one of three professors
collaborating on these efforts.