How Mosquitoes Sniff Out Human Sweat To Find Us
npr.org
npr.org
It mixes everything in the room around so that the carbon dioxide, sweat, and everything else can't be as easily used to target you.
"Eccrine sweat is clear, odorless, and is composed of 98–99% water; it also contains NaCl, fatty acids, lactic acid, citric acid, ascorbic acid, urea, and uric acid. Its pH ranges from 4 to 6.8. On the other hand, the apocrine sweat has a pH of 6 to 7.5; it contains water, proteins, carbohydrate waste material, lipids, and steroids. The sweat is oily, cloudy, viscous, and originally odorless; it gains odor upon decomposition by bacteria. Because both apocrine glands and sebaceous glands open into the hair follicle, apocrine sweat is mixed with sebum."
The article mentions acid lactic as a signaling metric. Only the Eccrine glands sweat contains it.
This explains why the no-correlation between strong oddor (casused by the apocrine sweat).
Now, as for my unique anecdotal contribution:
I 1) don't attract many mosquitoes but 2) when one of them does find its way to me, I'm non-reactive (no itchy bump). I'm both a sweaty and oily person, but I don't really produce BO. No stinky armpits (I save a fortune on deodorant), no stinky feet, etc. My father has a similar situation and he's non-attractive for them, but my siblings are less sweaty, but do produce BO and get eaten alive.
There's potential for bias here: (2) might be over-inflating your impression of (1). An alternative hypothesis (not trying to contradict your own experience!): you attract mosquitoes as much as the next person, but since you're nonreactive, you simply don't notice that mosquitoes are bothering you unless you happen to catch them in the act of biting you (which they're good at avoiding), or if you see or hear one flying around you (which could be chalked up to random flight, or them having trouble locating you).
> I'm both a sweaty and oily person, but I don't really produce BO
Another comment on this story (https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=19535422&goto=item%3Fi...) points out that mosquitoes home in on lactic acid, which is produced by non-odour-causing eccrine sweat glands, which explains why there is actually no correlation between human-perceptible body odour and mosquito attractiveness.
Beyond that, the fact that they have identified what receptors the mosquitoes use for sensing sweat means, like the article says, that new ways to foil the mosquitoes from sensing humans might be possible to devise in the future.
The reproductibility project was really a god send in this respect: https://osf.io/ezcuj/
The article doesn't mention blood group & specifically mentions that the merit of the research in finding the path i.e. CO2, Odour.
I dont' understand how blood can form path, unless it applies to only second bite i.e. Mosquitoes prefereing individuls with certain blood group after tasting it once.
It's O-type blood that's far more attractive to mosquitos.
In the South, we have a saying when you attract them: "You must have that sweet blood"
(And preepting the question: I stopped being ultra sweaty after a 20 day water-only fast, never to be sweaty again)
EDIT: s/food/water/
I had lost my appetite that time, so even first two days were easy.
On phone, so hard to google, but there have been a few we’ll documented cases of people going a whole year with just water, vitamins and ridiculously little protein (losing 100-250 pounds of fat in the process).
Also google valter lungo - fasting 2-3 days at a time is very healthy for you.
Was that the goal of the fast? And if yes, where did you learn that this works?
Took about 20 days for it to come back. Actually felt hunger at that point, which is a distinct feeling from appetite - one rarely felt in the 1st world)
That's the cheapest I have seen it in Thailand and at 39,000 Thai baht that is more than US$1,200.
Or military interest.
It could also lend itself to a new interpretation of the term SWATing.
My father grew up on a farm in a part of the world with a lot of mosquitos. He says he would work in the fields all summer shirtless and never even notice any mosquitos.
I hate going there in the summer because of the little bastards. (And the horseflies, I really hate them).
Wind forward 50 years of mostly city living in other parts of the world, and whenever he flies back to his childhood home for a few weeks holiday he gets eaten alive.
His blood type has not changed. He may be more sweaty as he is a little chubbier, but he was probably quite sweaty working in the fields as a kid as well.
I suspect it has to do with lifestyle. For him (and me) mostly working in office environments for most of the year for many years, makes your skin/odour/heat different than if you were an outdoorsy person that has a more hardened skin that is less attractive to mossies. Perhaps.
That said I don't really hear of anyone that lives in the mosquito heavy area that is susceptible to them whether they are office or farm people. Only outsiders. That may be self-selecting as they would move away though.
Musquittos died when bit him ( his parents have it to). I haven't seen it in real life, but he was an honest it guy. So I give him the benefit of the doubt
There's not a silver lining to everything. Some things just suck. Nature is brutal, not caring. Many relationships between organisms are purely parasitic, exploitative, not symbiotic. If you really want a downer, look up what some varieties of the cordyceps parasitic fungus do to ants.