Friday, 27 February 2026

Your diet - from the point of view of a mosquito

 

When a mosquito bites you and takes your blood, you probably just curse it. Isn't that selfish? You should think what your blood might be doing to the poor mosquito.

 

A recent paper by a Brazilian group in Rio (Menezes et al, 2025) fed mice a high fat/ high sugar diet for 20 weeks to get, not surprisingly, obese and diabetic mice. Mosquitoes then fed on these mice, or blood from the mice spiked with Zika virus, as well as on normal controls. You might imagine that the obese mice would make a more nutritious meal, but the results were surprising. Not only did the mosquitoes fed on a "high fat" diet show reduced survival, they also showed reduced systemic Zika virus infection.

 

Whilst mosquitoes accumulated lipids, and there was some worry that lipid acclimation would lead to more mosquito fertility, that does not seem to have been the case. Instead the diet seems to have triggered midgut extracellular matrix remodelling, and oxidative damage, eventually killing the insect. Oxidative stress has also been previously shown to have antiviral effects in mosquitoes, whilst blood supplementation with insulin has been shown to trigger mosquito antiviral signalling pathways. Thus altogether, feeding on obese mice had a detrimental effect on both mosquito and virus.   

 

But it's not all bad from the mosquito's POV. Release of radiation sterilised males has been used successfully against many insect pests - they mate with wild females but produce no eggs. The problem is that irradiation tends to make them weaker, so less competitive against wild males. Rodriguez et al (2013) tested three potential radioprotectors - ethanol (5%), trimethylglycine (0.08 g/ml), and beer. Interestingly, Aedes aegypti has more than a dozen genes encoding potential alcohol dehydrogenase proteins. Male mosquitoes were offered these solutions as the sole source of hydration for 48 hours before irradiation and all three potential radioprotectors significantly increased survival over the next two weeks. The beer incidentally was organic lager beer (5% APV, Samuel Smith Old Brewery, U.K) - it is unclear why a laboratory in New Mexico was using British beer, but it does show good taste on behalf of the researchers.

 

Applying these results to the human model is difficult to assess. Certainly the health risks of obesity would be far greater than any benefits from mosquito population dynamics. And beer consumption is actually proven to make humans more attractive to mosquitoes (Lefevre et al, 2010) - as is banana consumption (Paskewitz et al 2018).

 

On the other hand, in the event of an impending nuclear catastrophe, ingestion of large amounts of beer is probably to be recommended.

 

References

 

Lefèvre T, Gouagna LC, Dabiré KR, Elguero E, Fontenille D, Renaud F, Costantini C, Thomas F.  (2010). Beer consumption increases human attractiveness to malaria mosquitoes. PLoS One, 5(3), e9546. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0009546.

 

Menezes A, Walter-Nuno AB, Costa-Bartuli E, Moreira D, El-Bacha T, Méndez AP, Amarante A, Kistenmacker N, Huaman P, Busch M, Pereira J, Ramos I, Atella G, Parente T, Paiva-Silva G, Miranda K, Zancan P, Sola-Penna M, Gomes FM. (2025). A diet-induced obese and diabetic host phenotype reduces mosquito ZIKV infections and remodels gut metabolism. Front Immunol.,16, 1704301. doi: 10.3389/fimmu.2025.1704301.

 

Paskewitz S, Irwin P, Konwinski N, Larson S. (2018). Impact of Consumption of Bananas on Attraction of Anopheles stephensi to Humans. Insects, 9(4), 129. doi: 10.3390/insects9040129.

 

Rodriguez SD, Brar RK, Drake LL, Drumm HE, Price DP, Hammond JI, Urquidi J, Hansen IA. (2013). The effect of the radio-protective agents ethanol, trimethylglycine, and beer on survival of X-ray-sterilized male Aedes aegypti. Parasit Vectors, 6, 211. doi: 10.1186/1756-3305-6-211.

 

 

 

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