Researchers in the Netherlands took mosquitoes to a music festival to learn why some people get bitten more than others. They discovered that mosquitoes have a particular preference for the blood of people who had a few beers.
Lowlands is one of The Netherlands’ most popular music festivals. In 2023, the festival line-up included Billie Eilish and Florence + The Machine. The 3-day festival attracted around 60,000 people that year, as well as thousands of mosquitoes. Some of the insects were uninvited, as they usually are at festivals, but many other mosquitoes travelled with researchers from Radboud University Nijmegen as part of a creative research study.
The research team, led by Felix Hol, hoped to learn why some people tend to get more mosquito bites than others. An August festival weekend surrounded by thousands of people seemed like a perfect location to find out, so they invited Lowlands visitors to stick their arm in a box filled with mosquitoes. No festival-goers were harmed in this experiment. Their arms were protected by a material that could let their scent through for the mosquitoes to smell, but with such tiny holes that the mosquitoes could not reach through to actually bite them.
Mosquitoes love beer but hate showers
Over the course of the festival, around 500 people stuck their arm in the mosquito box, and every interaction was recorded on video for the researchers to analyse later. Meanwhile, the volunteers also answered a questionnaire about their behaviour at the festival.
By comparing these questionnaire answers with the videos that showed how many mosquitoes landed on each person’s arms (and how long they lingered there), the researchers saw some interesting patterns. The people who attracted the most mosquitoes were those who drank beer, as well as people who smoked marijuana or shared their bed with others. “They simply have a taste for the hedonists among us,” the researchers wrote in a preprint publication uploaded to BioRXiv. On the other hand, people who used sunscreen or recently took a shower were less enticing to the mosquitoes.
It all has to do with smells. When mosquitoes find a group of humans they decide who to bite based on scent. But what it is exactly that they like is still not clear. Even though mosquitoes prefer beer drinkers, Hol does not think it is the alcohol itself that draws them in. “People who have been drinking alcohol also behave differently, of course,” he said in an interview for Dutch radio program Vroege Vogels. “At a festival like Lowlands they might also be dancing more exuberantly, which can also change their body odor.”
Lowlands is a regular host to creative research. For example, they were also home to a study that showed a link between music and pain tolerance. Researchers are encouraged to propose interactive studies to take to the festival, both as a way to engage visitors with science, but also to take advantage of the unique setting.
But while a music festival is a perfect location to find a bunch of beer drinkers that will stick their arm in a box of mosquitoes, there are some drawbacks to doing research in a place like this. One of the issues is that people who attend festivals are overall younger and probably healthier than the average population. To really understand mosquito bites, researchers need to know how they bite others outside of festivals as well.
Even though this study is not the final word on what makes someone a “mosquito magnet”, it offers some clues to where researchers should look next. And in the meantime, it can’t hurt to try if a shower and sunscreen will keep mosquitoes away during the last warm weeks of the year.
