Backyard barbecues, picnics, outdoor concerts, and poolside evenings — they all have one thing in common and it’s not summer fun and fond memories. Nope. It’s mosquitoes. Those flying, buzzing, blood-sucking harbingers of itchiness.
Perhaps you can’t relate. Maybe you’re that annoying person who stands around at parties in shorts and a tank top making casual remarks about how mosquitoes don’t bother you.
How lovely for you. It’s irritatingly true that some people seem to be blessed with natural mosquito repellent qualities. Others aren’t that lucky — they can slather on the DEET, dress in long sleeves and jeans, and still walk away with millions of itchy welts.
Fortunately for Americans, mosquitoes are mostly just annoying (though not always). In other parts of the world, mosquitoes can be deadly — and that’s why science is working to understand just what it is about some people that makes them especially attractive to mosquitoes.
And though many of the biological and chemical pieces of the puzzle are still a mystery, here are some of the things scientists do know, or suspect, so far.
You might be delicious to mosquitoes
Mosquitoes biting
When you go to a buffet, you’ve got lots of choices. There’s the liver pate, the raw oysters, that weird thing entombed in Jell-O, and the bacon-wrapped, cheese-stuffed, baked cheese bites with extra cheese and a cheese dipping sauce.
Which one do you go for? Well, unless you have a thing for liver pate and raw oysters or weird things in Jell-O, you go for the cheese because cheese is delicious and those other things are less delicious. Therefore it should not surprise you to hear that mosquitoes also prefer delicious things over less-delicious things. And if you’re the person who always gets eaten alive at outdoor summer barbecues, well, it might be because you are delicious.
According to NBC, studies suggest that around 20% of the human population qualifies as “high attractor types,” which sounds awesome if it means you’re highly attractive to, say, other human beings. But no, no, being a “high attractor type” means that mosquitoes would rather eat you than the liver pate or the raw oysters.
So that sucks, but is there anything you can do to make yourself less appealing to mosquitoes? Yes. At the next barbecue, you can sit next to someone who the mosquitoes like even more than they like you. Or you can wear insect repellent, or long sleeves and a turtleneck. Or you can not go to summer barbecues. That last one is really the only guarantee.
Besides being gross, all that bacteria crawling around on you might attract mosquitoes Bacteria
So biologically, what is it about high attractor types that have doomed them to always being the most popular hors d’oeuvre at the mosquito buffet? As it turns out, a person’s deliciousness is a complicated mix of varying components, much like the deliciousness of the cheese appetizer is a complicated mix of cheddar, gouda, gorgonzola, and romano.
According to a 2011 study published in the journal PLOS One, the composition of a person’s skin microbiota can have a lot to do with his or her deliciousness.
The study found that the microbial communities that live on a person’s skin can impact the way that person smells to a mosquito — you know, like the smell of a nice aged gouda vs. the smell of whatever that thing in Jell-O is. People who had “a higher abundance, but lower diversity” of skin bacteria tended to be more attractive to mosquitoes, so if you have a lot of one type of bacteria crawling all over you and not much variety in the types of bacteria that are crawling all over you, mosquitoes are more likely to go for you.
You’re probably still getting over the whole “microbial communities are crawling all over me” thing, but the takeaway from all this is that your skin gives off an odor and that odor can change depending on how many microbes inhabit your skin, and that’s one part of what brings the mosquitoes to the buffet.
