Mosquitos Can Find Humans to Bite by Sensing Infrared Signals

Mosquitos kill more human beings than any other animal on earth, by transmitting diseases directly into our bloodstreams. Therefore, a lot of research has gone into how these bugs find humans to bite. Do they smell us? Find us by sight? Feel our body temperature? Or is it something more foreign to us, like the carbon dioxide in our breath? It's all of these, and even more. In fact, mosquitos don't go after humans until they sense at least two identifiers. But they have plenty of identifiers, including the infrared signals our bodies emit.

These infrared signals are not the same of the mosquito sensing body heat. They have to be within about a foot of our skin to feel the heat we produce, but can sense infrared much further away. And it's not the same as seeing the rest of the visible spectrum, because mosquito eyes cannot see infrared. A new study tells us that mosquitos have sensory organs at the tips of their antenna that pick up infrared signals. And, like their other senses, infrared detection does not draw a mosquito to bite us in the absence of other types of stimuli. As you can see from the graphic above, wearing loose-fitting clothing helps to mask the sense of infrared because that radiation can dissipate between our skin and the fabric. Read about the experiments that revealed a mosquito's ability to sense infrared at Phys Org.  -via Damn Interesting

(Image credit: DeBeaubien and Chandel et al.)