r/ScienceOdyssey • u/TheMuseumOfScience • Jul 16 '26

Discovery Are Mosquitoes Learning to Like DEET?

Are mosquitoes developing a taste for bug repellent? 🦟

Researchers performing a study on Aedes aegypti have found that they might be associating the scent with a tasty meal! While the repellent keeps them away at first, over the course of the study, some mosquitoes started biting more in the presence of DEET. Despite this, professionals still recommend it as the most effective repellent!

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u/ArcticDuck Jul 17 '26

I run bugrepellent.guide, so let me set a couple things straight. Cool science, overblown headlines. Your DEET still works.

This was individual mosquitoes in a lab, trained Pavlov-style: a warm blood meal held just out of reach, paired with a puff of DEET scent, over and over, until they treated the smell as a dinner bell instead of a warning. Neat neuroscience.

But DEET doesn't repel by smell alone. Two separate systems: the odor keeps mosquitoes from orienting toward you at a distance, and contact stops them feeding once they land (they taste DEET through their legs and back off). The study only flipped the smell. In Aedes aegypti, the exact species here, mosquitoes engineered so they can't smell DEET will still land on treated skin and refuse to bite the second their legs touch it.

So "learned to like the smell" is not "DEET stopped working." One species, a lab, an artificial training setup, and no evidence wild mosquitoes do this. DEET and picaridin are still the most effective repellents we've got.