I knew it. I called it years ago, and I didn’t need to conduct any scientific research. I always knew deep down, just below my mosquito bite-laden surface, that insect repellent is just salad dressing for bugs. It doesn’t make them go away; it just makes you more delicious.
That’s essentially the finding of new research detailed in the Journal of Experimental Biology, where scientists discovered mosquitoes can actually learn to associate DEET, the world’s most popular insect repellent ingredient, with food. In some cases, the bugs may even become attracted to it.
DEET has been the go-to insect repellent ingredient since the 1950s. It’s cheap, and it works, a combination that drives insect repellent manufacturers wild, almost as wild as DEET apparently drives the very insects it’s meant to repel, as researchers now say that mosquitoes might actually kind of like the stuff.
The Mosquitoes Are Outsmarting Us and Our Puny Bug Spray
Scientists from institutions including the University of Tours and Virginia Tech trained mosquitoes using a version of Pavlovian conditioning. Basically, if mosquitoes repeatedly smelled DEET while feeding on blood, they started associating its scent with a yummy, yummy, delicious meal instead of danger.
In lab tests, more than 60 percent of mosquitoes exposed to delicious blood alongside DEET later attempted to bite when they encountered DEET alone. Some even preferred a human hand slathered in delicious DEET over an un-slathered one. Untrained mosquitoes avoided the DEET-coated hand entirely.
There’s a lot of nuance and complexity going on in their extremely tiny brains. Mosquitoes are smarter than you think. While DEET may be doing its job repelling some, it might be training others to know that where there is DEET, there is blood.
The scientists were quick to point out that none of this means you should stop using bug sprays with DEET. It’s still highly effective at repelling bugs in real-world situations, especially when reapplied regularly. More than anything, the study should just provide some explanation of why you’re still getting bitten even after you’ve applied and reapplied. To some of those mosquitoes, you only make yourself more delicious.
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