Olde Hornet
Well-Known Member
You're Not Imagining It – Some People Really Are More Attractive to Mosquitoes, Study Shows
There’s something about you.
We already know that mosquitoes are attracted to human scents – among lots of other unwitting signals – but understanding why subtle differences in body odor affect mosquito attraction has so far remained hard to pin down.
Partly that's because of the complicated makeup of human body odor itself, formed as odorless secretions on our skin turn into gases called volatile organic compounds (VOCs) through interactions with bacteria in our skin microbiome.
There are thought to be over 1,000 human skin VOCs, many of which warrant further study, so it's difficult to know exactly how these chemicals relate to specific smells.
And that's before you consider there are about 3,600 known species of mosquito, each of which has likely evolved slightly different scent preferences, so there's still a lot we have to learn about how mosquito scent attraction works.
"It has become increasingly clear that there is a connection between human skin microbes and/or odors when mosquitoes target individual humans," the research team, led by senior author and neurogeneticist Matthew DeGennaro from FIU, explains in their paper.