Why some people are mosquito magnets while others get away unbitten

edited by Lisa Lock , reviewed by Robert Egan

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Add as preferred source Some mosquitoes really are picky eaters. They will not just stick their proboscis into any old human. We know this anecdotally, with some people claiming they are always bitten while others are completely ignored, though we don't really know why.

Previous studies linked skin bacteria and body odor to mosquito bites, but testing only one insect species at a time left a gap in our knowledge. Scientists still had no idea whether some people are universally irresistible to the insects or whether mosquito species have different tastes.

New research published in the journal iScience may have some answers. Scientists found that being a mosquito magnet isn't universal. Instead, each species favors its own distinct blend of human scents.

A team of researchers from Florida International University recruited 119 volunteers in Miami, Florida, and had each place an arm into a special scent chamber called a uniport olfactometer. At the other end of the tube, they placed three different species of disease-vector mosquitoes: Aedes aegypti (Yellow Fever Mosquito), Aedes albopictus (Asian Tiger Mosquito), and Culex quinquefasciatus (Southern House Mosquito).

Because Culex quinquefasciatus mosquitoes bite at night, volunteers wore nylon sleeves on their arms to capture their skin scent for later testing. The idea was to see which mosquitoes were attracted to which people.

The scientists sampled the air around each participant's arm inside a sealed nylon bag and analyzed the chemical makeup of their skin odors using gas chromatography-mass spectrometry (GC-MS). They also swabbed participants' forearms and used DNA sequencing to identify bacterial species living on their skin. Finally, they compared the most and least attractive volunteers for each mosquito species.

The study authors report that there was no universal mosquito magnet. None of the participants appeared in the top 10% of the most attractive participants for all three species. Aedes aegypti showed a slight preference for male participants, but the other two species demonstrated no sex bias. "Our findings indicated sex-specific differences in Ae. aegypti mosquito attraction but not in Ae. albopictus or Cx. quinquefasciatus mosquitoes," wrote the team in their paper.

Aedes aegypti and Culex quinquefasciatus were less attracted to people whose skin odor contained higher levels of certain cyclic alcohols and monoterpenes, which are plant-like, fragrant chemicals often found in essential oils. Meanwhile, Aedes albopictus was attracted to people carrying specific scents like ketones.

Skin bacteria play a key role in creating these distinctive scents. They feed on our sweat and natural oils, converting them into airborne odors that mosquitoes can detect. In all, the researchers identified 246 different types of skin microbes across the participants. Three of these appeared to be preferred by all three insect species.

They were Corynebacterium kefirresidentii, Cutibacterium granulosum and a variant of Staphylococcus epidermidis. Meanwhile, people who were least appealing to yellow fever and southern house mosquitoes carried higher levels of the bacterium Pseudomonas aeruginosa, which was absent from the skin profiles of the most attractive volunteers.

So now we are a bit closer to knowing why mosquitoes target some people and not others. "Each mosquito species exhibited distinct responses to individual humans, emphasizing both unique and shared cues for targeting their hosts."

Written for you by our author Paul Arnold , edited by Lisa Lock , and fact-checked and reviewed by Robert Egan —this article is the result of careful human work. We rely on readers like you to keep independent science journalism alive. If this reporting matters to you, please consider a donation (especially monthly). You'll get an ad-free account as a thank-you.

Kaylee M. Marrero et al, Individual humans are more attractive to certain mosquito species, iScience (2026). DOI: 10.1016/j.isci.2026.117006

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