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posted by Fnord666 on Wednesday July 24 2019, @06:41AM   Printer-friendly
from the odourless-scents dept.

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. Clément 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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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 24 2019, @05:29PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 24 2019, @05:29PM (#870766)

    wow, meticulous freaking setup and experiment.
    it's good they do things like this 'cause i was starting to believe them damn mosquitoes can teleport.
    they seem to randomly pop up in closed rooms and seem to vanish between two quickly approaching palms...