Researchers, he says, have discovered that mosquitoes are more attracted to men than to women, more to adults than to children, and more to larger persons than to smaller ones. Of these, smell seems the most important, especially at close range. The combinations are extraordinarily complex. Which is not to say that there hasn't been a lot of probing research, with a lot at stake. Forget the itching and irritation.
Mosquitoes are, by far, the deadliest animals on the planet.
They transmit malaria and other diseases to more than 700 million people each year. They will be responsible for the death of one out of every 17 people alive today. Scientists have been scratching their heads for decades trying to understand the little bloodsuckers. The earliest known reference to mosquitoes as disease-carrying insects dates from around 500 B.C., when an Indian Brahmin priest named Susruta correctly declared that mosquitoes were responsible for spreading malaria. Aristotle, in the fourth century B.C., observed that mosquitoes lived the early part of their lives as aquatic insects before changing into the flying form.