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Sometimes Mosquitoes Are Just Thirsty

Hi, I’m Scientific American podcast editor Steve Mirsky. And here’s a short piece from the August 2018 issue of the magazine, in the section called Advances: Dispatches from the Frontiers of Science, Technology and Medicine.

Bloodthirsty by Rachel Newark.

Mosquitoes are the world’s deadliest animals transmitting diseases that kill hundreds of thousands of people annually. Only the females bite to acquire protein to make the rags but blood can also serve as a refreshing beverage on a hot dry day.

A new study finds that dehydrated mosquitoes are more aggressive, land more often on hosts and feed more frequently than those with ready access to water.

And quenching the thirst they may also increase the spread of disease. Studies by Joshua Benoit, a biologist at the University of Cincinnati and his colleagues. It appeared in the journal scientific reports because so mosquitoes lay their eggs on water researchers have long assumed that winter conditions lead to more mosquito borne illness.

Yet, recent studies have hinted at the opposite, linking increased transmission of diseases such as West Nile fever to droughts, Benoit and his colleagues discovery helps to resolve these counterintuitive findings.

But became interested in the impact of dehydration on mosquito feeding behavior by accident, worker dropped a container of water deprived mosquitoes and noticed that they divebombed him with much greater vigor than usual.

Researchers studied three mosquito species that transmit yellow fever, Zynga or West Nile fever, exposed hundreds of insects to different temperatures and humidity levels in cages with or without access to water and nectar, which is mosquitoes preferred sugar source.

They then tested how often the pests chose to buy the host in this case a warm waxy plastic membrane coated and artificial sweat and filled with chicken blood, within a few hours up to 30% of mosquitoes without water fed on the host blood prepared with 5 to 10% of those that had water.

The findings could have real world applications for predicting rates of disease transmission.

That was bloodthirsty by Rachel Newark