Mosquitoes remember your smell :) :)

If someone tells you that mosquitoes bite you more often because you're too sweet, they may be a little bit right. At least according to a recent study published in Current Biology and led by Clément Vinauger and Chloé Lahondere.

According to their results, mosquitoes can quickly learn and remember our smells. And dopamine is key to this process. The Vinaguer and Lahondère team points out that mosquitoes use this information and incorporate it with other stimuli to develop preferences for people (or other foods) in particular.

However, the study also showed that even if an individual is considered to have a delicious odor, a mosquito's preference may change if that person's odor is associated with an unpleasant sensation, such as trying to scare them away or, if they are lucky, hitting them but surviving.
It is what is known as aversive training or learning, which uses stimuli that are not pleasant.

Twenty-four hours later, the same specimens (all females) entered a labyrinth where they had to fly against the wind. There they had two smells to choose from: the human smell that used to tempt them and another that exerted a controlling aroma. Mosquitoes avoided the smell of the human body by relating it to the negative experience, suggesting that they had been successfully trained.
By placing mosquitoes in an insect flying simulator and exposing them to various smells, including those of the human body, scientists observed how they, trained or untrained, reacted. What they saw was that the neural activity in the region of the brain where the olfactory information is processed was controlled by dopamine, which allowed them to better distinguish the aromas and learn from them.

Unfortunately, there is no way to know exactly what attracts a particular human being to a mosquito, Lahondere explains in a statement - Each human being contains unique molecular cocktails that include combinations of more than 400 chemicals. However, we now know that mosquitoes can learn the odors emitted by their host and avoid those that link to unpleasant experiences.
Understanding these mosquito learning mechanisms and preferences can provide new tools for mosquito control, adds Vinauger. For example, we could attack mosquitoes' ability to learn and use that to our advantage.