Mosquitoes are really goodin looking for their meals, but before mosquitoes set their eyes on a new meal — primarily blood — it can already smell a host's blood from across a room.

Researchers took a long time to figure out how these blood suckers like mosquitoes look for their next victim. Based on a new research, the very key to the insect's role for looking and securing their meals is its sense of smell.

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According to Science World Report, the researchers tracked the mosquitoes' behavior under a variety of circumstances by observing them in a wind tunnel that served as their closed and controlled environment. The researchers released 20 mosquitoes into a chamber with a single black dot that will be used to test the flying insect's other senses, like their sense of sight and smell.

The researchers noticed that the mosquitoes ,under regular conditions, didn't give any attention to the single black dot. Then, they decided to release CO2 into the chamber. The CO2 released mimicked the breath of an animal. After releasing the gas, the mosquitoes became interested in the aforementioned dot, making their way toward the black dot and land upon it.

A biologist at the University of Washington and co-author of the new paper on mosquitoes' sense of smell, Jeff Riffell said, "What's great about this wind tunnel is that it provided a nice control of wind conditions and the environment that these mosquitoes are flying around in, and we can really test the different cues and the mosquito's response to them."

Riffel explained that warm-blooded animals give off carbon dioxide rand this acts as a signal to mosquitoes. Even if the mosquitoes are up to 30 feet away from their victim, they can still sense where their victims are located.

He added that mosquitoes started to use their vision and their ability to distinguish the various types of body odor to differentiate whether their next meal is blood from a dog, a deer or a human, UPI reports.

Flores van Breugel, a postdoctoral scholar in Dickinson's lab and another author of the study, said that in their previous experiment using fruit flies, they found that the exposure to an attractive odor made the animals more attracted to visual features.  

For van Breugel, the results of their experiment were interesting findings about flies, so they suspected that mosquitoes would exhibit a similar behavior, Science World Report has learned.

A report on mosquitoes' search strategies to be published on August 17 in the journal Current Biology states that the carbon dioxide exhaled by animals, the look of high contrast objects and the warmth of bitable bodies all attract the mosquitoes. The study concluded that "the independent and iterative nature of the sensory-motor reflexes renders mosquitoes' host-seeking strategy annoyingly robust," Science News reports.

TagsMosquitoes, Study, Science