Eat more cookies

I suppose smelling “nonanal” should be considered a good thing, except that it makes one irresistible to certain mosquitoes.

In a neat ScienceNOW article by Martin Enserink, the author describes new research by entomologists at U.C. Davis to identify chemical compounds produced by our bodies that attract mosquitoes. It turns out that some people produce a good quantity of nonanal, a compound also produced by birds such as chickens and pigeons that are the preferred blood sources for mosquitoes like Culex pipiens, an important vector of West Nile Virus. The poor souls who produce nonanal in bird-like quantity are probably the same folks who get eaten alive at backyard cookouts while other folks suffer nary a nibble from those little winged fiends.

No doubt new research will build from this work, especially in the realm of mosquito traps that incorporate nonanal in their lures.