Mosquitoes track odors, locate hosts, and find mates visually. The color of a food resource, such as a flower or warm-blooded host, can be dominated by long wavelengths of the visible light spectrum (green to red for humans) and is likely important for object recognition and localization. However, little is known about the hues that attract mosquitoes or how odor affects mosquito visual search behaviors. A new University of Washington-led study shows that after detecting a telltale gas that we exhale, yellow fever mosquitoes (Aedes aegypti) fly toward specific colors, including red, orange, black and cyan, but they ignore other colors, such as green, purple, blue and white.
http://www.sci-news.com/biology/mosquit ... 10525.html
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If the researchers used filters to remove long-wavelength signals, or had the researcher wear a green-colored glove, then carbon dioxide-primed mosquitoes no longer flew toward the stimulus.
Genes determine the preference of these females for red-orange colors. Mosquitoes with a mutant copy of a gene needed to smell carbon dioxide no longer showed a color preference in the test chamber.
Another strain of mutant mosquitoes, with a change related to vision so they could no longer see long wavelengths of light, were more color-blind in the presence of carbon dioxide.
“These experiments lay out the first steps mosquitoes use to find hosts,” Professor Riffell said.
The team’s results were published in the journal Nature Communications.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-022-28195-x