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On summer evenings, we try our best to avoid mosquito bites by dousing our skin with bug repellents and lighting citronella candles. These efforts may keep the mosquitoes at bay for a while, but no solution is perfect because the pests have evolved to use a triple threat of visual, olfactory, and thermal cues to home in on their human targets, a new Caltech study suggests. The study, published by researchers in the laboratory of Michael Dickinson, the Esther M. and Abe M. Zarem Professor of Bioengineering, appears in the July 17 online version of the journal Current Biology.

When an adult female mosquito needs a blood meal to feed her young, she searches for a host--often a human. Many insects, mosquitoes included, are attracted by the odor of the carbon dioxide (CO2) gas that humans and other animals naturally exhale. However, mosquitoes can also pick up other cues that signal a human is nearby. They use their vision to spot a host and thermal sensory information to detect body heat.

But how do the mosquitoes combine this information to map out the path to their next meal?

To find out how and when the mosquitoes use each type of sensory information, the researchers released hungry, mated female mosquitoes into a wind tunnel in which different sensory cues could be independently controlled. In one set of experiments, a high-concentration CO2 plume was injected into the tunnel, mimicking the signal created by the breath of a human. In control experiments, the researchers introduced a plume consisting of background air with a low concentration of CO2. For each experiment, researchers released 20 mosquitoes into the wind tunnel and used video cameras and 3-D tracking software to follow their paths.

When a concentrated CO2 plume was present, the mosquitos followed it within the tunnel as expected, whereas they showed no interest in a control plume consisting of background air.

"In a previous experiment with fruit flies, we found that exposure to an attractive odor led the animals to be more attracted to visual features," says Floris van Breugel, a postdoctoral scholar in Dickinson's lab and first author of the study. "This was a new finding for flies, and we suspected that mosquitoes would exhibit a similar behavior. That is, we predicted that when the mosquitoes were exposed to CO2, which is an indicator of a nearby host, they would also spend a lot of time hovering near high-contrast objects, such as a black object on a neutral background."