Overview
- A peer-reviewed experiment led by Claudio Lazzari and published Thursday, May 28, found female Aedes aegypti can be Pavlovian-conditioned to associate the smell of DEET with a blood meal.
- In the trials researchers fed mosquitoes warm blood for 20 seconds while exposing them to DEET odor in the final 10 seconds and repeated that sequence three times to create the learned association.
- After training more than 60 percent of insects attempted to bite when exposed only to DEET odor and trained mosquitoes chose a DEET-sprayed hand over an untreated hand in a choice test.
- The authors stress the results were obtained under specific laboratory conditions and that the duration of the learned attraction and its occurrence in wild populations remain unknown.
- DEET remains the most widely used repellent and protects against mosquito-borne diseases, but the study suggests follow-up field and longevity research is needed to assess whether learning could reduce repellent performance in some real-world settings.