🔄FROM THE ARCHIVE: Mosquitos are an annoyance to all — but some people seem to attract them far more than others.
As I slept unaware beneath the stars one night in early July, what I can only assume to be a legion of mosquitoes declared war against my forehead.
I’ve been a mosquito magnet as long as I can remember, so I should have foreseen the itchy misery they would deliver upon my face. I offered them an exposed patch of flesh, they took it. Eight times. But my two companions — who by all outward appearances should have made equally suitable morsels — awoke unscathed.
“Why me?” I asked my swollen, red reflection in the morning. As I learned soon after, the tiny, winged hellhounds’ blood bias probably wasn’t random. Some people seem to be super-appetizing to mosquitoes . But the specifics of that attraction are far from straightforward. “It’s a very complicated process for the mosquitoes, no question about it,” says Joe Conlon, a medical entomologist and technical advisor with the American Mosquito Control Association. “There’s a great many things that are involved in attracting them.”It starts with sight. From a distance, mosquitos latch onto movement and dark colors, likely because they contrast with static, lighter surroundings.
, an organ with receptors that help it home in on carbon dioxide from as far as 150 feet away. “They follow a CO2 trail like a shark follows a blood trail,” Conlon says. “They kind of zigzag along it.” And since we all emit the gas when we breathe, they’ve got us pretty well
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