Why Some Mosquitos Prefer Humans Page 1 of 3

Why Some Mosquitos Prefer Humans

New York Times
by Angela Chen
July 23, 2020
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/23/science/mosquitos-genetics-
africa.html?action=click&block=more_in_recirc&impression_id=9dbf1821-cd47-11ea-aa75-
cdb822033562&index=1&pgtype=Article&region=footer
Article is edited for classroom use.
1065 Words

Mosquitos have been called the deadliest animal in the world. They are tiny creatures so
dangerous that genetic engineering may be necessary to defeat them. Mosquitos spread disease.
But not all mosquitos are equally responsible for devastating the human population with these
diseases. Out of thousands of species, only a few like to bite humans. And even within the same
species, mosquitos from different places have different preferences. Why do some mosquitos
find us irresistible, while others remain unimpressed? A team of Princeton University researchers
would like to answer that question. Their research was recently published in Current Biology.
Working with local collaborators, they spent three years driving around sub-Saharan
Africa. They collected the eggs of Aedes aegypti mosquitos. These mosquitos are responsible for
Zika, yellow fever, and dengue. There are two subspecies of Aedes aegypti. One prefers humans.
One prefers animals. Most mosquito populations are a genetic mix. The researchers sent the eggs
back to the lab at Princeton to hatch. They then tempted the insects with human and rodent
smells. The researchers found that the human-loving mosquitos came from areas with a dry
climate and dense human population. That, in turn, is because humans provide the water
mosquitos need to breed.
Lindy McBride is a Princeton neuroscientist and an author of the study. She says, “There
had been quite a bit of speculation that the original reason this species evolved to be a human
specialist had to do with its use of human water. It’s easy to come up with hypotheses, but what
was surprising was that you could actually see evidence for that.”
Like all mosquitos, Aedes aegypti lays its eggs on water. The project began by setting out
thousands of ovitraps. Ovitraps are little plastic cups lined with seed paper and filled with water
and dirty leaves. They are supposed to simulate the ideal breeding environment. They placed the
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ovitraps in big cities and in rural areas. They wanted to span environmentally diverse locations.
A few days later, someone came back and checked for eggs.
Noah H. Rose is a postdoctoral fellow at Princeton and co-author of the study. He says
not all of the expeditions were successful. “Sometimes you’d spend weeks in a place and just
didn’t get any eggs.” But in all, the team collected eggs from 27 locations. Once dried, the eggs
were like seeds. They could lie dormant for six months or a year before being hatched.
After new colonies were established, the next step was figuring out why some
populations evolved to prefer human blood, while others preferred animals. This required
deploying an olfactometer. An olfactometer is a big plastic box full of mosquitos. It has two
removable tubes in it. One tube contains a guinea pig (or, occasionally, a quail ordered from a
farm). A person places his or her arm into the other tube.
Dr. Rose says he spent “a couple months” as mosquito bait. “I was just sitting with my
arm in the tube doing this trial over and over again.” He repeated the experiment hundreds of
times while listening to audiobooks. Screens kept him and the guinea pig from actually being
bitten. Within minutes, mosquitos, attracted to either the human or the nonhuman scent, picked a
tube and entered it. Later, researchers removed the tubes to count the mosquitos and see how
many preferred Dr. Rose.
The resulting data revealed that mosquitos that originally came from very dense areas —
more than 5,000 people per square mile — preferred humans. They also had more ancestry from
the human-preferring subspecies. A bigger factor, however, was climate. Specifically, mosquitos
that preferred humans came from places that had a rainy season followed by a long, hot, dry
season. The scientists wondered, Why?
The scientists proposed an explanation. Mosquitos flourish during the rainy season, but
then must find a way to survive the dry season. Standing water, critical for mosquitos to breed, is
hard to find in extremely arid environments. But it can be found around humans. People store
water to live. People use a lot of water. Mosquito populations from arid regions evolved to take
advantage of the situation. Brian Lazzaro, a professor of entomology at Cornell University, calls
the evidence “pretty convincing.” He was not involved with the study.
Dr. Lazzaro also praised the team for gene-sequencing the mosquitos. That procedure
revealed that the human-loving mosquitos were genetically distinct from the animal-loving
mosquitos. It found that the preference for humans developed at one location and then spread
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across Africa. “They really see a single origin of these human-feeding mosquitos,” he said. “That
is a little surprising to me,” he added. He was surprised because there plausibly could have been
multiple instances of genetic adaptation.
The Current Biology paper focused on evolutionary history, but its findings might have
implications for public health. The results, combined with climate and population data from the
United Nations, suggest that by 2050, there will be more human-biting mosquitos in sub-Saharan
Africa. This will be caused by increasing urbanization.
Dr. McBride said, “I think it’s counterintuitive because people know the climate is
changing rapidly. So that should be the driving force. But the climate features that we found to
be important for this mosquito aren’t predicted to change in ways that affect the mosquito.”
Urbanization, in contrast, is occurring very quickly. Dr. McBride said, “You could easily
imagine this having an effect on disease transmission in big cities.”
Niels O. Verhulst is an entomologist at the University of Zurich in Switzerland. He was
also not involved in the study. But he called the new paper a “major achievement.” In 2003, Dr.
Verhulst gathered many papers on mosquito host preference for review. He found that they all
used different methodologies. This made them hard to compare. He was impressed that the
current study investigated so many different sites. He said it underscored how important it is for
cities to remove mosquito breeding sites.
Dr. Rose said that the team planned to conduct follow-ups at other sites in Africa. They
also want to study the brains of the human-specialist mosquitos. They want to figure out the
specific mechanisms that make them love our odor so much. We have much to learn about
mosquitos. “Their history is intertwined with our history,” he said. “And mosquitos are one of
the most interesting ways to understand how human and nature are linked together in the
contemporary world.”