Thermal image of human bodies
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Mosquitoes sense infrared from body heat to help track humans down | The Current
To an intelligent [sic] design creationists it must seem that the mosquito is the divine malevolence's delivery system of choice for getting its parasites into as many people as possible to maximise the suffering in the world.
There are others of course, such as the tsetse fly that delivers the parasite that causes sleeping sickness to humans and their cattle, which is probably the major reason Africans never developed agriculture, and ticks do their bit in spreading diseases too, but none are as effective as the mosquito which is responsible for transmitting parasites that cause the deaths of half a million or more people annually.
The World Health Organization has estimated that malaria alone causes 400,000 deaths a year, mostly children, then there is dengue, yellow fever, zika and several other diseases transmitted by the female mosquito when she takes a blood meal. To keep the blood flowing she first injects saliva which contains an anticoagulant. It also contains viruses and microorganisms such as Plasmodium falciparum.
What viruses and parasites are female mosquitoes the vectors for and how do these affect the human population?
Female mosquitoes are notorious vectors for several viruses and parasites that significantly impact human health. Here’s an overview of the main pathogens they transmit and their effects on the human population:
- Malaria
- Pathogen: Plasmodium parasites (primarily Plasmodium falciparum, P. vivax, P. ovale, and P. malariae)
- Vector: Anopheles mosquitoes
- Effect on Humans: Malaria is one of the deadliest diseases transmitted by mosquitoes, causing symptoms like fever, chills, and flu-like illness. Severe cases can lead to anemia, cerebral malaria, and death. Malaria remains a major public health problem, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa, causing over 600,000 deaths annually, most of which are children under five years old.
- Dengue Fever
- Pathogen: Dengue virus (DENV), which has four serotypes (DENV-1 to DENV-4)
- Vector: Aedes aegypti and Aedes albopictus mosquitoes
- Effect on Humans: Dengue fever causes high fever, severe headache, pain behind the eyes, joint and muscle pain, and rash. Severe forms, such as dengue hemorrhagic fever and dengue shock syndrome, can be fatal. Dengue is a major cause of illness in tropical and subtropical regions, with an estimated 100 million cases occurring annually.
- Zika Virus
- Pathogen: Zika virus (ZIKV)
- Vector: Aedes aegypti and Aedes albopictus mosquitoes
- Effect on Humans: Zika virus usually causes mild symptoms like fever, rash, and joint pain. However, it can cause severe birth defects, particularly microcephaly, when a pregnant woman is infected. Zika outbreaks have occurred in Africa, Southeast Asia, and the Pacific Islands, with the most notable outbreak occurring in Brazil in 2015-2016.
- Chikungunya
- Pathogen: Chikungunya virus (CHIKV)
- Vector: Aedes aegypti and Aedes albopictus mosquitoes
- Effect on Humans: Chikungunya causes fever and severe joint pain, often leading to chronic pain that can last for months or even years. The disease is rarely fatal, but it significantly impacts quality of life. It has caused numerous outbreaks in Africa, Asia, and the Americas.
- Yellow Fever
- Pathogen: Yellow fever virus (YFV)
- Vector: Aedes aegypti mosquitoes
- Effect on Humans: Yellow fever can range from mild symptoms like fever and muscle pain to severe liver disease with bleeding and jaundice, often leading to death. The disease is endemic in tropical areas of Africa and Central and South America, and despite the availability of a vaccine, it still causes significant mortality in unvaccinated populations.
- West Nile Virus
- Pathogen: West Nile virus (WNV)
- Vector: Culex species mosquitoes
- Effect on Humans: West Nile virus can cause a range of symptoms, from mild fever to severe neurological diseases such as encephalitis and meningitis. While most infections are asymptomatic, severe cases can lead to long-term neurological damage or death. The virus is prevalent in Africa, Europe, the Middle East, and the Americas.
- Lymphatic Filariasis (Elephantiasis)
- Pathogen: Wuchereria bancrofti, Brugia malayi, and Brugia timori (parasitic worms)
- Vector: Culex, Anopheles, and Aedes mosquitoes
- Effect on Humans: Lymphatic filariasis is a debilitating disease that causes lymphedema (swelling due to lymphatic system blockage), leading to severe disability and social stigma. The condition, known as elephantiasis, causes the enlargement and hardening of limbs and genitals. It affects millions of people, primarily in tropical and subtropical regions.
- Rift Valley Fever
- Pathogen: Rift Valley fever virus (RVFV)
- Vector: Various mosquito species, including Aedes and Culex
- Effect on Humans: Rift Valley fever primarily affects animals, but humans can also contract the virus, leading to symptoms like fever, muscle pain, and in severe cases, hemorrhagic fever, encephalitis, or blindness. Outbreaks are often associated with heavy rainfall and flooding, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa.
- Japanese Encephalitis
- Pathogen: Japanese encephalitis virus (JEV)
- Vector: Culex species mosquitoes
- Effect on Humans: Japanese encephalitis causes inflammation of the brain, leading to symptoms like fever, headache, vomiting, and neurological symptoms, including seizures and paralysis. It can be fatal or cause permanent neurological damage. The disease is endemic in parts of Asia and the Western Pacific.
Public Health Impact
The diseases transmitted by female mosquitoes have a profound impact on public health worldwide, particularly in tropical and subtropical regions. The economic burden includes the cost of medical treatment, lost productivity, and vector control programs. These diseases also contribute to poverty and hinder economic development in affected regions.
Efforts to combat mosquito-borne diseases include widespread vaccination campaigns (where vaccines are available), distribution of insecticide-treated bed nets, indoor residual spraying, and public health campaigns to reduce mosquito breeding sites. However, the control and eradication of these diseases remain challenging due to factors like insecticide resistance, climate change, and the rapid urbanization of tropical areas.
It is this act of injecting saliva which make the female mosquito such a dangerous insect, together with the fact that it seems to have salivary glands designed to contain the viruses and parasites.
But of course, to be really effective, the female mosquito must first find a victim. How she does this is the subject of a paper by A team led by researchers at the University of California Santa Barbara recently published, open access, in
Nature and explained in a UC Sata Barbara News release:
Mosquitoes sense infrared from body heat to help track humans down
While a mosquito bite is often no more than a temporary bother, in many parts of the world it can be scary. One mosquito species, Aedes aegypti, spreads the viruses that cause over 100,000,000 cases of dengue, yellow fever, Zika and other diseases every year. Another, Anopheles gambiae, spreads the parasite that causes malaria. The World Health Organization estimates that malaria alone causes more than 400,000 deaths every year. Indeed, their capacity to transmit disease has earned mosquitoes the title of deadliest animal.
Male mosquitoes are harmless, but females need blood for egg development. It’s no surprise that there’s over 100 years of rigorous research on how they find their hosts. Over that time, scientists have discovered there is no one single cue that these insects rely on. Instead, they integrate information from many different senses across various distances.
A team led by researchers at UC Santa Barbara has added another sense to the mosquito’s documented repertoire: infrared detection. Infrared radiation from a source roughly the temperature of human skin doubled the insects’ overall host-seeking behavior when combined with \(\small \ce{CO2}\) and human odor. The mosquitoes overwhelmingly navigated toward this infrared source while host seeking. The researchers also discovered where this infrared detector is located and how it works on a morphological and biochemical level. The results are detailed in the journal Nature.
The mosquito we study, Aedes aegypti, is exceptionally skilled at finding human hosts. This work sheds new light on how they achieve this.
Dr. Nicolas DeBeaubien, co-lead author
Department of Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology
University of California, Santa Barbara, CA, USA.
Guided by thermal infrared
It is well established that mosquitoes like Aedes aegypti use multiple cues to home in on hosts from a distance.
These include \(\small \ce{CO2}\) from our exhaled breath, odors, vision, [convection] heat from our skin, and humidity from our bodies. However, each of these cues have limitations.
Dr. Avinash Chandel, co-lead author
Department of Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology
University of California, Santa Barbara, CA, USA.
The insects have poor vision, and a strong wind or rapid movement of the human host can throw off their tracking of the chemical senses. So the authors wondered if mosquitoes could detect a more reliable directional cue, like infrared radiation.
Within about 10 cm, these insects can detect the heat rising from our skin. And they can directly sense the temperature of our skin once they land. These two senses correspond to two of the three kinds of heat transfer: convection, heat carried away by a medium like air, and conduction, heat via direct touch. But energy from heat can also travel longer distances when converted into electromagnetic waves, generally in the infrared (IR) range of the spectrum. The IR can then heat whatever it hits. Animals like pit vipers can sense thermal IR from warm prey, and the team wondered whether mosquitoes, like Aedes aegypti, could as well.
The researchers put female mosquitoes in a cage and measured their host-seeking activity in two zones. Each zone was exposed to human odors and \(\small \ce{CO2}\) at the same concentration that we exhale. However, only one zone was also exposed to IR from a source at skin temperature. A barrier separated the source from the chamber prevented heat exchange through conduction and convection. They then counted how many mosquitoes began probing as if they were searching for a vein.
Adding thermal IR from a 34º Celcius source (about skin temperature) doubled the insects’ host-seeking activity. This makes infrared radiation a newly documented sense that mosquitoes use to locate us. And the team discovered it remains effective up to about 70 cm (2.5 feet).
What struck me most about this work was just how strong of a cue IR ended up being. Once we got all the parameters just right, the results were undeniably clear.
Dr. Nicolas DeBeaubien.
Previous studies didn’t observe any effect of thermal infrared on mosquito behavior, but senior author Craig Montell suspects this comes down to methodology. An assiduous scientist might try to isolate the effect of thermal IR on insects by only presenting an infrared signal without any other cues. “But any single cue alone doesn’t stimulate host-seeking activity. It’s only in the context of other cues, such as elevated \(\small \ce{CO2}\) and human odor that IR makes a difference,” said Montell, the Duggan and Distinguished Professor of Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology. In fact, his team found the same thing in tests with only IR: infrared alone has no impact.
A trick for sensing infrared
It isn’t possible for mosquitoes to detect thermal infrared radiation the same way they would detect visible light. The energy of IR is far too low to activate the rhodopsin proteins that detect visible light in animal eyes. Electromagnetic radiation with a wavelength longer than about 700 nanometers won’t activate rhodopsin, and IR generated from body heat is around 9,300 nm. In fact, no known protein is activated by radiation with such long wavelengths, Montell said. But there is another way to detect IR.
Consider heat emitted by the sun. The heat is converted into IR, which streams through empty space. When the IR reaches Earth, it hits atoms in the atmosphere, transferring energy and warming the planet. “You have heat converted into electromagnetic waves, which is being converted back into heat,” Montell said. He noted that the IR coming from the sun has a different wavelength from the IR generated by our body heat, since the wavelength depends on the temperature of the source.
The authors thought that perhaps our body heat, which generates IR, might then hit certain neurons in the mosquito, activating them by heating them up. That would enable the mosquitoes to detect the radiation indirectly.
Scientists have known that the tips of a mosquito’s antennae have heat-sensing neurons. And the team discovered that removing these tips eliminated the mosquitoes’ ability to detect IR.
Indeed, another lab found the temperature-sensitive protein, TRPA1, in the end of the antenna. And the UCSB team observed that animals without a functional trpA1 gene, which codes for the protein, couldn’t detect IR.
Pits at the end of the mosquito’s antennae shield the peg-like structures that detect thermal IR.
Diving into the biochemistry
The activity of the heat-activated TRPA1 channel alone might not fully explain the range over which mosquitoes were able to detect IR. A sensor that exclusively relied on this protein may not be useful at the 70 cm range the team had observed. At this distance there likely isn’t sufficient IR collected by the peg-in-pit structure to heat it enough to activate TRPA1.
Fortunately, Montell’s group thought there might be more sensitive temperature receptors based on their previous work on fruit flies in 2011. They had found a few proteins in the rhodopsin family that were quite sensitive to small increases in temperature. Although rhodopsins were originally thought of exclusively as light detectors, Montell’s group found that certain rhodopsins can be triggered by a variety of stimuli. They discovered that proteins in this group are quite versatile, involved not just in vision, but also in taste and temperature sensing. Upon further investigation, the researchers discovered that two of the 10 rhodopsins found in mosquitoes are expressed in the same antennal neurons as TRPA1.
Knocking out TRPA1 eliminated the mosquito’s sensitivity to IR. But insects with faults in either of the rhodopsins, Op1 or Op2, were unaffected. Even knocking out both the rhodopsins together didn’t entirely eliminate the animal’s sensitivity to IR, although it significantly weakened the sense.
Their results indicated that more intense thermal IR — like what a mosquito would experience at closer range (for example, around 1 foot) — directly activates TRPA1. Meanwhile, Op1 and Op2 can get activated at lower levels of thermal IR, and then indirectly trigger TRPA1. Since our skin temperature is constant, extending the sensitivity of TRPA1 effectively extends the range of the mosquito’s IR sensor to around 2.5 ft.
A tactical advantage
Half the world’s population is at risk for mosquito-borne diseases, and about a billion people get infected every year, Chandel said. What’s more, climate change and worldwide travel have extended the ranges of Aedes aegypti beyond tropical and subtropical countries. These mosquitoes are now present in places in the US where they were never found just a few years ago, including California.
The team’s discovery could provide a way to improve methods for suppressing mosquito populations. For instance, incorporating thermal IR from sources around skin temperature could make mosquito traps more effective. The findings also help explain why loose-fitting clothing is particularly good at preventing bites. Not only does it block the mosquito from reaching our skin, it also allows the IR to dissipate between our skin and the clothing so the mosquitoes cannot detect it.
Loose fitting clothing lets through less IR.
Despite their diminutive size, mosquitoes are responsible for more human deaths than any other animal. Our research enhances the understanding of how mosquitoes target humans and offers new possibilities for controlling the transmission of mosquito-borne diseases.
Dr. Nicolas DeBeaubien
The technical details will tell creationists just how clever their favourite malevolence has been in its mosquito design:
Abstract
Mosquito-borne diseases affect hundreds of millions of people annually and disproportionately impact the developing world1,2. One mosquito species, Aedes aegypti, is a primary vector of viruses that cause dengue, yellow fever and Zika. The attraction of Ae. aegypti female mosquitos to humans requires integrating multiple cues, including \(\small \ce{CO2}\) from breath, organic odours from skin and visual cues, all sensed at mid and long ranges, and other cues sensed at very close range3,4,5,6. Here we identify a cue that Ae. aegypti use as part of their sensory arsenal to find humans. We demonstrate that Ae. aegypti sense the infrared (IR) radiation emanating from their targets and use this information in combination with other cues for highly effective mid-range navigation. Detection of thermal IR requires the heat-activated channel TRPA1, which is expressed in neurons at the tip of the antenna. Two opsins are co-expressed with TRPA1 in these neurons and promote the detection of lower IR intensities. We propose that radiant energy causes local heating at the end of the antenna, thereby activating temperature-sensitive receptors in thermosensory neurons. The realization that thermal IR radiation is an outstanding mid-range directional cue expands our understanding as to how mosquitoes are exquisitely effective in locating hosts.
Main
Aedes aegypti is an invasive mosquito species that transmits flaviviruses, impacting a growing proportion of the world’s population1,2. As female mosquitoes blood feed multiple times, they often shuttle viruses causing diseases ranging from dengue to yellow fever, Zika and chikungunya2. Ae. aegypti integrate multiple sensory cues to locate and navigate towards humans3,4,5,6 (Fig. 1a). Integration is essential as any single stimulus is inadequate to differentiate humans from other targets. Detection of exhaled \(\small \ce{CO2}\) elevates their locomotor activity and increases their responsiveness to other host-derived stimuli, such as visual cues3,4,5,6. However, Ae. aegypti has poor visual acuity, limiting its usefulness in discriminating between people and other hosts7. Organic olfactory cues are particularly important for finding humans. However, the efficacy of \(\small \ce{CO2}\) and olfactory cues in providing directional information is limited by air-current disturbances that exceed the mosquito’s flight speed, or if the host is moving quickly8. When mosquitoes are very close to the skin surface, they detect moisture and convective body heat4,9.
Fig. 1: Set-up for testing IR radiation as a potential host-associated cue.
a, Known host-associated sensory cues. b, Modes of thermal energy transfer: convection, conduction and IR radiation. The peak emission wavelength (λM) of emitting bodies at 34 °C is around 9.4 µm. c, The host-associated cues presented during the assay: human odour, 5% (v/v) \(\small \ce{CO2}\) and heat in the form of IR radiation. Assay cages were 4 cm from the arena wall that housed the Peltier device to mitigate the effect of convective cues. Human odour was applied uniformly on the outside of the mesh of the assay cage from a used nitrile glove. \(\small \ce{CO2}\) was delivered through perforated tubing, which formed a perimeter around both the control and IR zones. d, The Peltier device housing. An IR-transparent polyethylene (PE) film blocked convective cues from reaching the mosquitoes. e, Schematic of the behavioural assay. Mosquitoes were presented with IR and their host-seeking behaviour was video recorded for 5 min. f, Representative video frame taken from an experiment in which females were exposed to human odour and 5% \(\small \ce{CO2}\). One zone was exposed to 34 °C radiant heat from a Peltier device. The Peltier device behind the other zone was off, and equilibrated to the ambient temperature (temp.) (29.5 °C). The position of each host-seeking mosquito was recorded during the experimental window. In all of the experiments in which \(\small \ce{CO2}\) was provided, it was applied using the indicated time series (in seconds) unless otherwise stated. g, The PI, calculated from the indicated formula, using the total number of host-seeking observations in each zone during the 5 min experiment. PI < 0 indicates preference for zone 1; PI > 0 indicates preference for zone 2.
Conductive heat requires contact, and convective heat is sensed at close range16. Thus, if mosquitoes sense thermal IR radiation, then surface body temperature could be detected at greater distances, as radiant heat is not limited by the physical constraints of convection and conduction. Thermal IR emitted by humans (~34 °C skin surface) has a peak emission wavelength of around 9.4 μm, with 90% of its energy between 3–30 μm (ref. 19). This electromagnetic radiation is much lower energy than the ~300–700 nm wavelengths that activate rhodopsins20. Thus, if mosquitoes detect thermal IR, this sensation should not rely on phototransduction.
Few animals are thought to sense IR for navigation or sensing prey. These include rattlesnakes21,22, certain beetles23,24, western conifer seed bugs25, kissing bugs and ticks26,27. By contrast, it has been reported that mosquitoes, including Ae. aegypti, are not attracted to IR9,28,29 However, in these studies, thermal IR was presented alone rather than in the presence of other host-associated stimuli9,28,29. Given the importance of multisensory integration in host seeking3,4,5,6, we wondered whether mosquitoes might exhibit attraction to thermal IR, but only in combination with other host cues.
[…]
Discussion
The finding that thermal IR is an important cue that Ae. aegypti females use to find their targets counters reports that Ae. aegypti do not respond behaviourally to thermal IR9,28,29. However, previous research examined IR in isolation. Ae. aegypti require multisensory integration to home in on people, and individual human-associated cues, such as IR, \(\small \ce{CO2}\) plumes and organic odours, have little efficacy in stimulating host-seeking behaviour on their own3,4,5,6. Our finding that IR is used in combination with other cues adds critical breadth to the Aedes toolkit—allowing them to home in on humans from mid-range distance in varied and dynamic environments.
The thermal IR that emanates from surface body temperature is far lower in energy than the longest wavelengths that activate visual pigments20. Rather than detecting photons directly, a more plausible mechanism for thermal IR detection is that the radiant energy warms dendrites in coeloconic sensilla near to the tip of the antenna, which in turn activates thermosensitive receptors. In support of this model, removal of the distal portion of the antenna, which contains heat-sensitive neurons12,13,15, eliminates IR attraction. While past research reports that the coeloconic sensilla at the distal end of the antenna sense convective heat13, the design of the thermosensitive peg-in-pit coeloconic sensilla at the antennal tip is more consistent with a sensor of radiant than of convective heat. Located in a pit, the neurons would be largely protected from convective currents, and would receive radiant heat preferentially from the direction of the pit aperture. Directionality is important for a radiant heat sensor, but would reduce the sensitivity of a convective heat sensor. Nevertheless, at very close range, the neurons in peg-in-pit sensilla would also be activated by convection heat.
We propose that IR impinging on the peg-in-pit sensilla is partially absorbed by the cuticle, and then energy is transferred to the endolymph through conduction. Some IR might also penetrate the cuticle and directly warm the endolymph. We found that the heat-activated TRPA1 channel is expressed in neurons at the antennal tip and is required for responding to IR. By contrast, trpA1 mutants display normal attraction to conductive/convective heat in the temperature range of human skin17. In the presence of conductive/convective heat, the role for TRPA1 is to help to avoid ≥50 °C conditions (ref. 17), even though TRPA1 is activated with a threshold of only around 32 °C (ref. 41). The anatomical location for this close-range TRPA1 function appears to be distinct from IR sensation. Our data support the model that TRPA1 senses IR at mid-range distances (~0.7 m) through the ‘warming neurons’ in the peg-in-pit sensilla.
Two opsins (op1, op2) and trpA1 are co-expressed at the end of the antenna, and mutations eliminating these opsins reduce IR sensation, but only at lower intensities of radiant heat. We propose that contributions of both opsins and TRPA1 to detecting radiant heat endows mosquitoes with a greater dynamic range for sensing radiant heating. We suggest that, at higher IR intensities, the radiant heat is sufficient to directly activate TRPA1, while, at lower levels of thermal IR, activation of the opsins initiates a cascade that amplifies the signal and indirectly activates TRPA1.
In conclusion, thermal IR represents an important mid-range cue that is used by Ae. aegypti to couple longer- and shorter-range cues. As An. stephensi are also attracted to thermal IR, we speculate that detection of the IR may be widely used among blood-feeding mosquitoes to home in on warm-blooded hosts. Finally, the finding that thermal IR is an effective host-seeking cue raises the possibility of developing strategies to interfere with this attraction, and the opportunity to devise more effective mosquito baits (Supplementary Discussion).
Chandel, A., DeBeaubien, N.A., Ganguly, A. et al.
Thermal infrared directs host-seeking behaviour in Aedes aegypti mosquitoes.
Nature (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-024-07848-5
Copyright: © 2024 The authors.
Published by Springer Nature Ltd. Open access.
Reprinted under a
Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license (CC BY 4.0)
Clearly, if we assume for the sake of argument that intelligent [sic] design creationism has any merit, a great deal of design perfection has gone into designing the ways in which mosquitoes find their victims and deliver their cargo of infectious parasites. Just in case any creationists feel tempted to suggest that delivering parasites to warm-blooded animals like humans was not the design purpose of mosquitoes, it should be pointed out that their putative designer is allegedly both omniscient and omnipotent so anything it designs is designed in full knowledge of what it will do and, if in the unlikely event of undesired outcome, scrapping the design and starting again should be well within the designer's capability, so we have to assume any outcome was intentional and the purpose of the design.
And of course, we can dismiss the traditional creationist excuse of 'genetic entropy' causing 'devolution' [sic] as Michael J Behe's excuse for parasites, since the clever design for finding a blood meal is distinctly advantageous for the mosquito and can't possibly be described as 'devolution'.
If we don't assume intelligent design, however, we are left with a mindless evolutionary process with no plan and no intent, malevolent or otherwise. We are left with a full and complete explanation of how and why mosquitoes have these abilities and why they infect us with parasites, so increasing the suffering in the world - there is no benevolent god organising it.
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