The Mosquito.

You know the noise, you know the feeling, but you don’t know why the heck in a room of 10 people, you come out looking like you’ve caught some foreign disease.

An article in the Smithsonian covered the question: “Why do mosquitos bite some people more than others?” We’ve taken the most important ideas on why an estimated 20% of people are more tasty to the blood suckers than others.

1. Blood Type

Studies have shown that mosquitos bite us to harvest the proteins in our blood – therefore some people’s Type O is tastier than the Type A’s.

One study found that in a controlled setting, mosquitoes landed on people with Type O blood nearly twice as often as those with Type A. People with Type B blood fell somewhere in the middle of this itchy spectrum.

2. Carbon Dioxide 

It seems as though those little devils locate their victims by smelling your breathe. Mozzies use their maxillary palp organ to smell the carbon dioxide emitted from people and can do this from as far as 50 meters away.

As a result, people who simply exhale more of the gas over time—generally, larger people—have been shown to attract more mosquitoes than others.

3. Exercise 

Lactic acid, uric acid and ammonia that are released in sweat, are also a favourite of the nuisance. Mosquitos are attracted to these scents as well as people with a higher body temperature.

Because strenuous exercise increases the buildup of lactic acid and heat in your body, it likely makes you stand out to the insects.

4. Beer

A beer is not only the start to making other people attractive, it also gets blood-eating pests going.

Researchers had suspected this was because drinking increases the amount of ethanol excreted in sweat, or because it increases body temperature, neither of these factors were found to correlate with mosquito landings, making their affinity for drinkers something of a mystery.

5. Pregnancy

If you’re pregnant your body temperature and percentage of carbon dioxide that you exhale would be higher than the average person – therefore making it easier for mosquitoes to smell and target such people.

They exhale about 21 percent more carbon dioxide and are on average about 0,5 degrees Celsius warmer than others.

6. The Colour Of Your Clothes

As weird as it may seem, the colour you are wearing could effect how many times you get those dreaded itchy bites. Along with their strong sense of smell, mosquitos are attracted to those wearing colours that stand out.

For more click here.  

[Source: Smithsonian]