
You probably know that mosquitoes are primarily attracted to the carbon dioxide we exhale. Or if you didn’t know that, well, that’s why the little buggers follow you around. We can’t smell it, but they can, as you sit there at camp, exhaling, basically emitting the mosquito version of the smell of delicious fresh-baked bread all over the place.
But, new research shows, there’s a second-level attractor that might be what prompts the mosquito to bite you: specific colors.
Scientists at the University of Washington collected a bunch of female mosquitos (males don’t bite), and put them in a container. When they pumped in a little carbon dioxide, the mosquitos got out little tiny bibs and knives and forks and looked around for food. Scientists then put little dots of color in with the mosquitos to see how they reacted. If the dot was blue, green, purple, or white, colors that have short wavelengths, the mosquitos ignored them. But colors with longer wavelengths, red, black, orange, for example, were like ringing a dinner bell.
In case you’re wondering, human skin, regardless of individual pigmentation, is firmly in the red-orange, longer wavelength spectrum.
Does this mean if you wear blue you’re less attractive to mosquitos? According to this study, of these particular buggers, yes. At least, the parts of you wearing blue.
“Imagine you’re on a sidewalk and you smell pie crust and cinnamon,” Professor Jeffrey Riffell, who led the study said. “You’d probably start looking around for it.”
But if you see things you don’t associate with pie, you’d likely ignore it. That seems to be the case with mosquitos too.
You can read more here, then we assume, head to your nearest outdoor goods store and stock up on all the blue, white, and green clothes you can get.
Photo: Presley Roozenburg/Unsplash
i would imagine a large dose of hip hop halftime music, or some loud hank williams (senior) music could be a repellant? or am i thinking of repelling the hordes of humans?…………………..
please note: i listen to a lot of one of these genre of music………..
I remember sitting by an alpine lake in the sierras trying to cook dinner and getting bitten by zillions of mosquitos. I distinctly remember them biting through my jeans which I wouldn’t have thought possible. Blue jeans. So I was going to dispute this but then I looked at the actual paper.
It’s funny how cyan (light blue) is just as bad as orange, while dark blue and green (on either side of the spectrum from cyan) are ignored. Maybe my jeans were closer to cyan.
And no, I don’t wear jeans backpacking anymore.
Full on test coming in North Texas starting in a few weeks. Will report back with findings.