I hear you exclaim. But no, mad as this might sound, itâs no myth. With the magic of modern science itâs possible to give a laboratory fruit fly the smelling ability of a mosquito, which is exactly what a group of scientists did recently to work out how these bloodthirsty winged menaces hunt us down for dinner.Mosquitoes are universally acknowledged as the most dangerous animals on earth owing to the number of deaths they cause by spreading diseases like malaria, dengue and yellow fever, which together run to hundreds of millions of cases per year. Scientists and doctors are therefore very eager to track down how it is that mosquitoes home in on us, and what attracts them to humans in the first place, because if we can understand how theyâre doing this then we can come up with better repellents. At the moment, substances like DEET (diethyl toluamide) are produced by chemical trial and error, but by knowing exactly how a mosquito identifies its next meal, it ought to be possible to produce more macho molecules tailor-made to turn a hungry mosquito into an anorexic.Fundamental to the mosquitoâs human-tracking ability is its olfactory arsenal.
