If you’ve ever lain awake at night, kept sleepless by the buzz, hum, and bites of a cloud of mosquitoes, you’ll know about the insect’s unerring ability to pinpoint humans from what seems like a mile away.
Scientists are only just beginning to understand how sensitive a mosquito’s senses are, particularly their sense of smell – and it really is pretty amazing.
A paper published in the science journal Cell has found that even if you try and degrade a mosquito’s sense of smell, it simply doesn’t work. Doctor Margo Herre, of Rockefeller University in the United States, is impressed.
“Mosquitoes are breaking all of our favourite rules of how animals smell things,” Dr Herre said.
Dr Herre’s colleague on the project, Professor Leslie Vosshall, agrees.
“If you’re a human and you lose a single odorant receptor, all of the neurons that express that receptor will lose the ability to smell that smell,” Prof. Vosshall said – but added that mosquitoes don’t work like we do.
“You need to work harder to break mosquitoes because getting rid of a single receptor has no effect. Any future attempts to control mosquitoes by repellents or anything else has to take into account how unbreakable their attraction is to us.”
Super-sniffers
Generally speaking, most animals have a narrow range of scents for each neuron associated with their sense of smell. A particular neuron can only pick up a particular and very specific scent – but not so mosquitoes.
The researchers found that, in our buzzing friends, a single neuron can pick up multiple scents; in their words, this creates a “failsafe” in a mosquito’s brain, making it harder to render human scents invisible to them.
And it may not be just mosquitoes that have this ability.
“This may be a general strategy for insects that depend heavily on their sense of smell,” said Prof. Vosshall.
Better keep investing in Aerogard, it seems.
