(Cody Cottier/ Discovery) — As I slept unaware beneath the stars one night in early July, what I can only assume to be a legion of mosquitoes declared war against my forehead.
I’ve been a mosquito magnet as long as I can remember, so I should have foreseen the itchy misery they would deliver upon my face. I offered them an exposed patch of flesh, they took it. Eight times. But my two companions — who by all outward appearances should have made equally suitable morsels — awoke unscathed.
“Why me?” I asked my swollen, red reflection in the morning. As I learned soon after, the tiny, winged hellhounds’ blood bias probably wasn’t random. Some people seem to be super-appetizing to mosquitoes (next time you meet one, make sure to thank them for their sacrifice). But the specifics of that attraction are far from straightforward.
“It’s a very complicated process for the mosquitoes, no question about it,” says Joe Conlon, a medical entomologist and technical advisor with the American Mosquito Control Association. “There’s a great many things that are involved in attracting them.” (…)