FILE-Photo of young woman scratching the itch on her arm.
In a paper published Friday in the journal Nature Communications, a professor of biology at the University of Washington, Jeff Riffell, who led a research group examining what attracts the pesky insects to people. The team examined mosquito vision, finding in a series of experiments that the insects were attracted to certain colors, including red and orange.
In one experiment, researchers set up a wind tunnel that allowed the mosquitoes to fly freely as an array of video cameras recorded their every move.
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“When you stimulated them and gave them a little puff of CO2 and there was a red cue, they would go to it and be attracted to it,” Riffell said. “These are the same colors reflected from your skin.”
The smell of carbon dioxide — the gas we exhale — triggers mosquitoes’ vision.
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Aedes aegypti mosquitoes are a public health scourge that infect people with diseases like yellow fever, dengue fever, West Nile and Zika.
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