You can actually teach mosquitoes to stop bothering you

If you are one of those ‘mosquito-attracters’, there is just a convenient way to free yourselves from these annoying little flying blood-suckers and it’s not even expensive, as all you have to do is swat and the mosquitoes will stay away, even if you miss the shot.

Most of us smack at mosquitoes, some of them get killed, while others manage to survive and fly away. However, even those who fly away would then might just leave us alone by sensing it. If a person swats a mosquito and keeps on missing, the mosquito will sense the swatting vibrations through the person’s scent and will stay away from them, study suggests.

The study published in Current Biology states that mosquitoes prefer some people over others based on their looks, scent or acts; they don’t just choose their victims at random. The researchers put mosquitoes and various odors in a vertex that produced vibrations similar to missed hand swats on arms. Within 15 minutes, the mosquitoes connected the odors with vibrations detecting threatening signals and kept themselves away from it, a memory that will last for a day for the mosquitoes, reported The New York Times.

You can now track mosquitoes through your mobile phones

The lead author Dr. Jeffery Riffell said, “If you are at a party or a barbecue and you are swatting the mosquitoes, make sure that your friend next to you is active in talking and they will probably avoid you and go [for] your friend.”

The study also showed that this ability to relate scents and possibility of being squashed is because of a chemical in brain, dopamine. Mosquitoes with damaged dopamine system were not provoked by odors much and were also less able to learn to avoid them, wrote The Guardian.

The authors believe that this study can benefit them in public health efforts, such as creating genetically modified mosquitoes that are in short of the ability to sense dopamine levels.

“By understanding how mosquitoes are making decisions on whom to bite, and how learning influences those behaviors, we can better understand the genes and neuronal bases of the behaviors. This could lead to more effective tools for mosquito control,” said Dr. Riffell.