Not long ago scientists had the novel idea to kill mosquitoes by turning our very own blood into a toxic, insect-killing death substance:
Not surprisingly, I think most of us were like:
So it would appear that the scientists have reverted to Mosquito Killing Plan B:
Researchers in Maryland may have figured out a way that turns their affinity for breeding against them — leaving them disinterested in you until they die off days later.
Entomologists at the University of Maryland traveled to West Africa to test their theory out. They took venom from spiders and scorpions and mixed it with fungus native to that region. Each spore of that supercharged fungus, which is microscopic in size, meant death to mosquitoes.
"Venom from spiders and scorpions [mixed] with fungus."
I'm not sure how they figured out that this would be the winning combination to kill these bloodsuckers. I would guess that's a story in and of itself!
Thankfully, it apparently gets the job done. And the poison itself is deployed by a pretty deviously clever method:
"We used male mosquitoes to disseminate the fungus," he said. "We can just let male mosquitoes walk on the fungus, then they carried out and they find the females."
It's the females that like to find your ankles, arms and everywhere else. But when male mosquitoes mate with them, they pass on the nerve toxin added to the fungus, turning it into a deadly, sexually transmitted disease.
Researchers are "working to make the fungi smell like flowers," and they're also puzzling out how to make this method work for the rest of the world and not just in West Africa, since fungi are different everywhere.
"The trick is though, to get ready now," Professor Raymond St. Leger warns, "because the mosquitoes are coming [to America], the diseases are coming."
You love to see this kind of scientific advance — no poison blood needed!
Let's just hope it works on American mosquitos too!
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