Abstract
Mosquitoes transmit many pathogens, like malaria (by Anopheles), lymphatic filariasis (by Culex), Zika virus and Dengue virus (by Aedes). Female mosquitoes have robust preferences for human odours over animal odours. A recent study showed that some olfactory glomerulus within the Aedes aegypti was significantly activated by human odours but weakly activated by animal odours. Among the odour chemicals, decanal and undecanal played dominant roles. However, most previous studies adopted lab-reared mosquitoes who were investigated in 1-way or 2-way enclosed tunnels. Here we studied wild Anopheles and Culex mosquitoes in an open environment and found that no mosquito could be caught without either CO2 or heat, indicating that both CO2 and heat gate the responses to other odorant stimuli. Only wet clothes soaked with human sweat (but not human-scented dry clothes) attracted 20–50% more mosquitoes at 37°C and showed no effect at 25°C. Thus for Anopheles and Culex, human odour may only play a significant role in the host-seeking behavior only upon sweating. And neither decanal nor undecanal attracted mosquitoes in our field study, indicating inefficacy of any single volatile substance.
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This work was supported by the Sichuan Province Youth Science and Technology Innovation Team (20CXTD0062) to SY and the Applied Basic Research Program of Sichuan Province (2020YJ0410) to ZWZ.
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Xin-Yue Yang, Lin-Bei Xie, and Ting Liu contributed equally to this work.
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Statement on the welfare of animals. The animal study was reviewed and approved by the Animal Ethics Committee of Sichuan Agricultural University, China, on May 30, 2022.
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Xin-Yue Yang, Xie, LB., Liu, T. et al. Human Odour Attracts Anopheles and Culex Mosquitoes only Upon Sweating. Biol Bull Russ Acad Sci 50, 1356–1361 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1134/S1062359023600745
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1134/S1062359023600745