Researchers from University of Washington and the California Institute of Technology, have successfully observed mosquitoes long enough to decode their pattern of finding food.

They will smell you, might not exactly be groundbreaking. But what is so, is that, they smell your breath and not ‘you’. The carbon dioxide you expel with every breath is their muse. When they have got your scent, their visual cues shift into drive, quickly followed up with their heat senses.

They will smell you, might not exactly be groundbreaking. But what is so, is that, they smell your breath and not ‘you’. The carbon dioxide you expel with every breath is their muse. When they have got your scent, their visual cues shift into drive, quickly followed up with their heat senses.

How are strong is their sense of scent? They can smell you out from up to 30 feet away.

“Carbon dioxide is the best signal for a warm-blooded animal, and they can sense that from up to 30 feet away – quite a distance,” Mr. Riffell, researcher and co-author on the paper,  said. “And then they start using vision and other body odors to discriminate whether we’re a dog or a deer or a cow or a human. That may be how they discriminate among potential blood hosts.”