Wind Tunnel Mosquito Trajectory Data

Mosquitoes track odors, locate hosts, and find mates visually. The color
of a food resource, such as a flower or warm-blooded host, can be
dominated by long wavelengths of the visible light spectrum (green to red
for humans) and is likely important for object recognition and
localization. However, little is known about the hues that attract
mosquitoes or how odor affects mosquito visual search behaviors. We use a
real-time 3D tracking system and wind tunnel that allows careful control
of the olfactory and visual environment to quantify the behavior of more
than 1.3 million mosquito trajectories. We find that CO2 induces a strong
attraction to specific spectral bands, including those that humans
perceive as cyan, orange, and red. Sensitivity to orange and red
correlates with mosquitoes’ strong attraction to the color spectrum of
human skin, which is dominated by these wavelengths. The attraction is
eliminated by filtering the orange and red bands from the skin color
spectrum and by introducing mutations targeting specific long-wavelength
opsins or CO2 detection. Collectively, our results show that odor is
critical for mosquitoes’ wavelength preferences and that the mosquito
visual system is a promising target for inhibiting their attraction to
human hosts.