Why One Dangerous Mosquito Developed A Taste For Human Blood
Given the choice between an animal and a human, the Aedes aegypti species prefers ... us. A new study explains how that happened.
A mosquito that transmits dangerous viruses like dengue and Zika seems to have developed a taste for human blood because of the way that people store water — which mosquitoes need for laying eggs — in hot, dry climates.
That's according to a new study in Current Biology that tested the biting preferences of Aedes aegypti populations from 27 locations across sub-Saharan Africa, the ancestral home of this mosquito species.
Aedes aegypti is one of the few mosquito species that really loves to bite humans, says Lindy McBride, a biologist at Princeton University who notes that there are around 3,500 known mosquito species.
"In general, mosquitoes
