“Four minutes is too long.”Some of Chris Zuo’s itchy results after his session with the mosquitoes. David L. HuThat’s the note undergraduate Chris Zuo sent me along with photos of countless mosquito bites on his bare skin. This full-body massacre wasn’t the result of a camping trip gone awry. He’d spent that limited amount of time in a room with 100 hungry mosquitoes while wearing nothing but a mesh suit we thought would have protected him.Thus began our three-year journey trying to understand the behavior of a deceivingly simple insect, the mosquito. It may sound like a professor’s sadistic plan, but, really, we did everything by the book. Our university’s institutional review board approved our procedures, making sure Chris was safe and not coerced in any way. The mosquitoes were disease-free and native to our home state of Georgia. And this session resulted in the first and last bites anyone received during the study.AdvertisementAdvertisementBesides my role as torturer of students, I am an author and professor at Georgia Tech with over 20 years of experience studying the movement of animals.Mosquitoes are the world’s most dangerous animal. The diseases they carry, from malaria to dengue, cause over 700,000 deaths per year. More people have died from mosquitoes than wars.The world spends US$22 billion per year on billions of liters of insecticides, millions of pounds of larvicides, and millions of insecticide-treated bed nets – all to fight a tiny insect that weighs 10 times less than a grain of rice and has only 200,000 neurons.Yet, people are losing the war on mosquitoes. These insects are evolving to thrive in cities and spreading disease more rapidly with climate change. How can such simple animals find us so easily?AdvertisementAdvertisementScientists know mosquitoes have terrible eyesight and depend on chemical cues to make up for it. Knowing what attracts a mosquit …
