Image copyright Getty Images Image caption The mosquito repellent - aka Skrillex
The sun is shining on your skin, there's a breeze in your hair and someone has just handed you a coconut with a straw sticking out of it. This is living.
But just as you start to relax you find yourself clawing at your own skin, scratching at the mosquito bites that have developed on your body over the past few days.
But it doesn't have to be this way.
According to a recent scientific study, the way to avoid mosquito bites is to listen to electronic music - specifically dubstep, specifically by US artist Skrillex.
Sound is "crucial for reproduction, survival, and population maintenance of many animals," says a team of international scientists specialising in mosquitoes and the diseases they carry.
They subjected adults of the species Aedes aegypti, known as the yellow fever mosquito, to electronic music to see whether it could work as a repellent.
Scary Monsters And Nice Sprites, a track by Skrillex which features on his Grammy-award winning album of the same name, was chosen because of its mix of very high and very low frequencies.
"In insects, low-frequency vibrations facilitate sexual interactions, whereas noise disrupts the perception of signals from conspecifics [members of the same species] and hosts," the scientists said.
And the results, which were published in the journal Acta Tropica, were good news for us and for Skrillex.
Image copyright Getty Images Image caption Fumigating, like what this man is doing in Indonesia, is normally used to help prevent the spread of yellow fever mosquitoes
Female adult mosquitoes were "entertained" by the track and attacked hosts later and less often than those in a dubstep-free environment.
Scientists said "the occurrence of blood feeding activity was lower when music was being played".
The scientists also found that mosquitoes exposed to the song had sex "far less often" than mosquitoes without music.
"The observation that such music can delay host attack, reduce blood feeding, and disrupt mating provides new avenues for the development of music-based personal protective and control measures against Aedes-borne diseases."
So, the next time you're at your wit's end on holiday, scratching up your arms and legs, you know what to hook up to the wireless speaker.
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TheKharmeleon on April 2nd, 2019 at 02:58 UTC »
Music based? Why would it have to be music? Couldn’t you just make a device that emits the proper frequencies?
traffickin on April 2nd, 2019 at 01:07 UTC »
A huge problem with this finding is right in the experimental design, the control group was "no music" and the experiment was this one particular song. There's no way of substantiating wider claims about the qualities of music outside of this one skrillex song without some kind of structure about what qualities they decided have the desired effect on mosquito behaviour, and finding other songs that resemble sprites and monsters against songs that do not share those specific variables.
TLDR: scientists played a skrillex song to mosquitoes, it fucked them up, and this study has absolutely no authority in saying why.
mvea on April 1st, 2019 at 22:19 UTC »
The post title is a copy and paste from the title and first paragraph of the linked popular press article here:
Journal Reference:
Hamady Dieng, The Ching Chuin, Tomomitsu Satho, Fumio Miake, Erida Wydiamala, Nur Faeza A. Kassim, Nur Aida Hashim, Ronald E. Morales Vargas, Noppawan P. Morales,
The electronic song “Scary Monsters and Nice Sprites” reduces host attack and mating success in the dengue vector Aedes aegypti,
Acta Tropica, 2019, ISSN 0001-706X,
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.actatropica.2019.03.027.
Link: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0001706X19301202
Abstract:
Sound and its reception are crucial for reproduction, survival, and population maintenance of many animals. In insects, low-frequency vibrations facilitate sexual interactions, whereas noise disrupts the perception of signals from conspecifics and hosts. Despite evidence that mosquitoes respond to sound frequencies beyond fundamental ranges, including songs, and that males and females need to struggle to harmonize their flight tones, the behavioral impacts of music as control targets remain unexplored. In this study, we examined the effects of electronic music (Scary Monsters and Nice Sprites by Skrillex) on foraging, host attack, and sexual activities of the dengue vector Aedes aegypti. Adults were presented with two sound environments (music-off or music-on). Discrepancies in visitation, blood feeding, and copulation patterns were compared between environments with and without music. Ae. aegypti females maintained in the music-off environment initiated host visits earlier than those in the music-on environment. They visited the host significantly less often in the music-on than the music-off condition. Females exposed to music attacked hosts much later than their non-exposed peers. The occurrence of blood feeding activity was lower when music was being played. Adults exposed to music copulated far less often than their counterparts kept in an environment where there was no music. In addition to providing insight into the auditory sensitivity of Ae. aegypti to sound, our results indicated the vulnerability of its key vectorial capacity traits to electronic music. The observation that such music can delay host attack, reduce blood feeding, and disrupt mating provides new avenues for the development of music-based personal protective and control measures against Aedes-borne diseases.