If you’ve ever attended an outdoor music festival and wondered why your exposed skin was serving as a feast for mosquitoes, the answer might have to do with your drink of choice. In what might be the most impressive choice for fieldwork ever, a group of researchers arrived at the Netherlands’ Lowlands Music Festival seeking to answer an existential question for many music fans: Does drinking beer make someone more attractive to mosquitoes?
The paper, which has an all-time great title — “Blood, sweat, and beers: investigating mosquito biting preferences amidst noise and intoxication in a cross-sectional cohort study at a large music festival” — was based on results from a lab that was set up at the festival in question. Participants in the study were asked questions about their personal hygiene, diet and alcohol consumption. Then, each participant had their arm placed in a cage where mosquitoes could choose between biting them and opting for a sugar feed.
Among the scientists’ findings: drinking beer does make someone more attractive to mosquitoes. The authors wrote that “mosquitoes showed a clear fondness for those who drank beer over those who abstained from the liquid gold.” Attraction itself also sparked interest from the airborne insects. The scientists observed, “participants that successfully lured a fellow human into their tent the previous night also proved more enticing to mosquitoes.”
As for what turned mosquitoes off, the use of sunscreen and an aversion to showering made the bugs less likely to feast. Which may leave some hygiene-focused music fans with a dilemma on their hands.
The researchers who conducted the study concluded that mosquitoes “simply have a taste for the hedonists among us.” As Paul Arnold observed in an article on the study for Phys.org, the scope of these results is limited, with a focus on only one festival. Still, the paper’s authors did note that their work is “to our knowledge the largest study of its kind.” If nothing else, it’s a good reminder about the importance of sunscreen at outdoor festivals.
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