Mosquito attractants?

CO2 produced by sucrose (pure table sugar) fermented by yeast provide good source at field situation. you can see Smallegange et al., 2010b for detailed procedure.

Good Luck

Dirty socks and body odour have been used with fan traps. "The worn sock in each trap was from the volunteer assigned to sleep in the corresponding hut, and were generally used as immediately worn, except during experiment 4 for which socks had been stored frozen at -20°C to build up sufficient material." from

Citation: Jawara M, Smallegange RC, Jeffries D, Nwakanma DC, Awolola TS, et al. (2009) Optimizing Odor-Baited Trap Methods for Collecting Mosquitoes during the Malaria Season in The Gambia. PLoS ONE 4(12): e8167. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0008167

Link from:

Good luck with your research Barbara

I go with Mengistu Dawit's answer. You can use brown sugar solution fermented by yeast placed in a bottle-like container with dark (black is preferred) color. It will produce CO2 which attractive to mosquito. This method usually being used at indoor condition, perhaps it will works at outdoor.

Live chicken in trap!

There is no mosquito "pheromone" unless you have new information. If so please share.

@Saul - I'm planning to trap all possible since I'm actually doing a survey of their parasites, but my target mainly are Aedine species due to the high Dengue incidence in the country

@David - as far as I have read, most traps incorporate or imitate more or less human odor

thank you for all the suggestions, I'll look into them asap

I worked on the chemistry human-produced attractant for 5 years but did not find anything that added to the original finding (from my USDA laboratory) of L-lactic acid released by human skin, plus CO2 released by skin and breath. The "stinky/cheesy feet" odors while present, were not particularly attractive to Aedes and Culex spp. when added to CO2 and lactic acid, and failed, so far as I know, in field tests against Anopheline mosquitoes.

To my knowledge, the principals attractive substance for Mosquitoes are: CO2, 1-ocetn-3-ol (Octenol), Lactic acid, Phenols and Butanone, acetic acid and Amino acid.

Consider that mosquitoes are more attracted to moving subjects, dark colors and that the attractiveness varies according to the activity carried out by the individual.

You can see:

- HOEL D.F., KLINE D.L., ALLAN S.A. & GRANT A. 2007. Evaluation of carbon dioxide, 1-octen-3-ol, and lactic acid as baits in mosquito magnet™ pro traps for Aedes albopictus in north central Florida. Journal of the American Mosquito Control Association, 23(1): 11–17.

- HOEL D.F., OBENAUER P.J., CLARK M., SMITH R., HUGHES T.H., LARSON R.T., DICLARO J.W. & ALLAN S.A. 2011. Efficacy of ovitrap colors and patterns for attracting Aedes albopictus at suburban field sites in north-central Florida. Journal of the American Mosquito Control Association, 27(3): 245–251.

- YEE W.L., & FOSTER W.A.. 1992. Diel sugar-feeding and host-seeking rhythms in mosquitoes (Diptera: Culicidae) under laboratory conditions. Journal of Medical Entomology 29: 784-791.

- KAWADA H., TAKEMURA S-Y., ARIKAWA K., & TAKAGI M. 2005. Comparative Study on Nocturnal Behavior of Aedes aegypti and Aedes albopictus. Journal of Medical Entomology 42(3): 312-318.

- H. KAWADA, S. HONDA & M. TAKAGI 2007. Comparative Laboratory Study on the Reaction of Aedes aegypti and Aedes albopictus to Different Attractive Cues in a Mosquito Trap. Journal of Medical Entomology 44(3): 427-432.

Hope this help

if you are planning to collect mosquitoes having preference to feed on human being than you can use the worn cloths as suggested by the Tigar Barbara, otherwise may try the clothed rubbed on the animal of choice (but i have not tried this for mosquito collection).

There is no shortcut method for mosquito collection. Go out to the field and collect the landing mosquitoes using an aspirator. For some species like Culex quinquefaciatus the best method is to collect resting mosquitoes indoors. I have tried sugar solution+yeast, octanol etc. The results were not satisfactory.

"Collect the landing mosquitoes" actually means to suck on a plastic tube with mesh inside. This is to aspirate the mosquitoes landing on your bare leg skin, hopefully before they bite somewhere else and give you some nasty disease.

The US Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has said none of its grantees is allowed to hire people in foreign countries with grant money to go out and aspirate mosquitoes like this because of this danger.

The CO2 trap was not a useful method for collection of Aedes spp, you can use BG trap or aspiration from their resting sites, You can collect Aedine mosquito by BG traps, see the web page:http://www.bg-sentinel.com/ , you also can make ovitraps.

Good luck and hope my answer was useful for you

Thank you for the help everyone!

I worked on 2 papers on this subject not often cited. Schreck, CE, D.L. Kline & D.A. Carlson. Mosquito attraction to substances from the skin of different humans. J Amer. Mosquito Control Assoc. 6, 206-210, 1990. We showed attraction to human hand residues from touching glass plates that lasted up to 6 hours, better if heated to colony and new colony Aedes aegypti.. The residues were consistently more attractive for the African-American vs Caucasian subject.

Field studies on the potential of butanone, carbon dioxide, honey extract, 1-octen-3-ol, L-lactic acid ad phenols as attractants for mosquitoes. Kline, D.L., W. Takken, J.R. Wood and D.A. Carlson. Med. Vet. Entomol. 4, 383-391, 1990. My summary- We tried everything newly discovered, as well as older popular attractants. Wild mosquitoes, tabanids and biting midges were caught in the Everglades with enhanced CDC traps without lights. Catches of some species were 1.4 to 13.8 x enhanced depending on the attractant, but numbers were highly variable. It is necessary to look at all the data because there are no magic answers. Butanone was not attractive.

A recent paper by J. Tumlinson et al J. Chem. Ecol. 2012. described plant-based volatile attractants for female colony malaria mosquitoes studied by EAG and analytical chemistry.

Mosquitoes are attracted to light in a certain spectral range. They are more attracted to blue and green lights. Carbon dioxide is the most important attractant for mosquitoes. R-Octenol is an EPA registered secondary attractant that mimics human breath.

I recently bought a fancy, shiny NEW MOSQUITO TRAP sold with LED lights. I put it under my roofed back porch in N. Florida next to 2 acres of native wild vegetation with its many tree-hole mosquitoes, warm fall weather. I caught only tiny yellow-colored flies, no hungry mosquitoes.