Insects have meal preferences even if they’re not too choosy

With the monsoon comes the mosquito menace, and frenzied thoughts on how to deal with them. Discoveries relating to their food preferences are particularly germane as human beings are prime candidates and any insights into mosquitoes’ prandial predilections provide pointers on how to stay below their radar.

The composite picture emerging from studies in the last few years is that when it comes to bloody good meals, what (female) mosquitoes want — the vegetarian males stick to flower nectar — are hot, sweaty, smelly (even beery), not to mention large and tall human “hosts”, wearing dark colours for easy identification.

It is also useful to know that they like their food to be O+, complemented by certain bacterial condiments present on the skin.

As the first few prerequisites relate to the enhanced carbon dioxide emanations caused by those conditions, we could consider it a yen for a certain kind of molecular gastronomy.

But the latter attributes appear to be favoured simply because larger humans — including pregnant ones — obviously present a more generous surface area for would-be diners to bite down on.

It would be dangerous, however, to think that these proclivities are universal or even unchangeable, as plenty of those who do not fall into this expansive-and-odoriferous category also feature as mosquito meals.