Kylie Rifle
If you’ve ever felt like a street lamp on a wet day, threatened by mosquitoes that seem to be obsessed with you, you may want to rethink your wardrobe.
According to a report published Friday in the journal Nature Communications, after capturing a person’s breath, annoying bloodsuckers scan the perimeter for victims, identifying certain colors: red, orange, black and cyan. It is probably better to dress in shades of green, purple, blue and white.
“Imagine you’re on the sidewalk smelling of pie and cinnamon crust,” said Jeffrey Riffer, a biologist at the University of Washington and senior author of the study. “This is probably a sign that there is a bakery nearby and you can start looking for it. Here we began to learn what visual elements mosquitoes are looking for after smelling their own version of a bakery.
Riffel and other researchers tested how mosquitoes respond to different tones after being exposed to carbon dioxide – what we exhale every time we exhale. The team first placed female Aedes aegypti mosquitoes in small chambers, which are known to transmit dengue, yellow fever, chikungunya and Zika virus. The females were chosen because, unlike the males, they are the vampires who ruin tropical vacations by feasting on our blood.
To begin with, the crew observed how the creatures in the cage responded to stimuli such as colored dots in the absence of odors. In principle, they did not. The researchers then repeated the process by spraying CO2. In this repetition, with synthetic human breath, mosquitoes were super attracted to red, orange, black and cyan, but did not blink when it came to green, purple, blue and white.
But mosquitoes may not analyze colors as you might expect. Scientists aren’t sure that bugs can “see” color the way we do – just like we can’t “smell” CO2 the way they can. However, the colors to beware of have an objective similarity: longer wavelengths in the visible spectrum.
This brings us some bad news.
Human skin, regardless of pigment, emits long wavelengths similar to those of red-orange shades. “One of the most common questions they ask me is, ‘What can I do to stop mosquitoes from biting me?'” Rifle said. “I’ve said before that there are three main signals that attract mosquitoes: your breath, sweat and your skin temperature. In this study, we found a fourth line: the color red, which can not only be found on your clothes, but is also found in everyone’s skin. “
In fact, Riffell experimented with this piece as well, placing a human hand in a CO2-containing mosquito cage with and without a green glove. Of course, the green glove was enough to function as a disguise, leaving the bugs uninterested.
There is also some bitter news. Female mosquitoes can be a type of “colorblind” in the presence of CO2 if their genetics encode such a characteristic. For example, the team says there is a mutant strain of bugs that can’t “see” the delicious, long wavelengths.
Squeeze your thumbs the next time you try a bold red lipstick or an all-black look, you’ll encounter either a mutant threat or just one that ignores the alluring scent of your breath.