The twins each placed a hand into one arm of the Y. Air was then blown up the two arms of the tube, carrying the smell toward the 20 female mosquitoes, which were held there for 30 seconds to ensure that they had smelled whatever was blowing their way. The researchers used a Y-shaped tube, with mosquitoes held in an enclosure at the bottom end, to see which arm of the Y the mosquitoes would choose to fly into.
Altogether, there were 18 pairs of identical twins and 19 pairs of non-identical twins.Īfter washing their hands with fragrance-free soap and air-drying them, the twins were ready to become mosquito bait. To avoid effects of either gender or menstrual cycle, they focused only on women aged between 50 and 90 years old. To test the hypothesis, the researchers used a group of brave volunteers drawn from the TwinsUK database. So it's possible that the smells associated with genetics could overlap with the smells used by mosquitoes. This suggests that twins who share more of their DNA also have a more similar smell. A 2005 study found that people could match identical twins by smell at rates better than chance but couldn’t do the same for non-identical twins. The way a person smells seems to be determined at least partly by genetics. This makes sense: if mosquitoes use smell to find a suitable meal, they’d evolve to sniff out stable smells, not smells that change with every meal. What evidence we have seems to lean away from food as a factor. What we don’t properly understand is what causes those differences in smell.Ī widespread myth is that certain foods can repel or attract mosquitoes, but there’s no clear explanation for how diet could change attraction levels, write the authors of the new study. A number of different studies have found that differences in body odor are related to interest from mosquitoes.
We’ve known for a while that smell is at least a partial explanation for why some people are mosquito fodder while others return from the outdoors unscathed. We don't really understand why, but a recent paper in PLOS One suggests that genes could play a role in the attraction. It’s not just popular imagination: mosquitoes bite some people more than others.
0 kommentar(er)
