Mosquitoes See Red (Literally) when They Smell Human Breath
A hungry mosquito can sense the carbon dioxide a person exhales from 100 feet away, and a new study reveals that the gas triggers the insect’s visual system to pinpoint human skin tones.
“The odor is just telling them that something is out there, but their vision is telling them where it could be located,” says University of Washington neurobiologist Jeff Riffell, lead author of the study in Nature Communications. Tracking 1.3 million mosquito trajectories, his team found that the insects are drawn to red and orange…