Tags: Pest Control Temecula, Pest Control Murrieta, Mosquitos, Mosquito Control
By Kiley Riffell
new scientific study suggests that what you wear could help alleviate the scorn of mosquitoes.
Researchers at the University of Washington led the study, which concluded that wearing colors like red, orange, black and cyan attracts mosquitoes to your body. On the other hand, wearing clothing composed of colors including green, purple, blue and white may actually deter different species of mosquitoes.
Jeffrey Riffell, a professor of biology at the University of Washington and a lead author of the study. Scientists previously knew very little about the color preferences of mosquitoes.
Of studies before this and the work was very contradictory.
Reasons, he noted, including how it "could have very strong impacts" on developing new traps on mosquitoes that carry certain diseases. In addition to testing theories on how clothing can attract or divert mosquitoes, color patterns in and around homes may also have the same effects.
Riffell explained that mosquitoes' ability to smell carbon dioxide, which human beings cannot, activates their visual sense. Mosquitoes essentially smell a potential host first and then activate their visual senses to locate the host.
He said it was analogous to humans walking down the street and getting a whiff of some kind of food or sweets, causing the individual to look around for where the smell is coming from—such as a bakery.
"What was interesting about the study was that the mosquitoes didn't sort of pay attention to the colors or visual objects. "But once you gave them CO2, it's this cue from our breath that they really become activated."
He said that prior to conducting this study, the three major cues that attracted mosquitoes included human breath, sweat and skin temperature.
"CO2 travels far distances including mosquitoes' ability to smell it from as far as 100 feet away. "Their vision is not as good as ours, but they can start seeing us from 20 feet away or so. Once they see us, they investigate us."
Now, he said another cue is integral to understanding mosquitoes' attraction to humans: the color red located in human skin.
These orange-red colors present in skin emit a type of signal to mosquitoes to detect and locate hosts.
"No matter what your pigmentation or skin tone, across all humans we're really reflecting in these colors. It is tricky," he said. "The mosquitoes have all of these redundant systems, so they're not only detecting us by CO2 but they're looking at us visually for red, but they're also looking for heat or body vapor for sweat."
