Ben Greenfield on science: what the evidence says · JRE #1069
“there was a little cool little anecdote from that study too, where they found that mosquitoes actually have like, like they learn. If you swat at the mosquito, it actually learns to avoid you.”
What the evidence says
A real, peer-reviewed 2018 study (Vinauger et al., Current Biology) found that Aedes aegypti mosquitoes can learn to associate a specific odor with a mechanical shock mimicking a swat, and subsequently avoid that odor for roughly 24 hours; the effect depended on the dopamine-1 receptor. The learning is odor-based rather than based on visually recognizing an individual person: the study showed mosquitoes could learn to avoid the scent of one host species (rats) while still approaching another (chickens), indicating the mechanism shifts host-odor preference rather than tracking a specific individual by sight. So the core claim, that a real study found swatted-at mosquitoes learn to avoid the source of the shock, is supported, but framing it as learning to avoid "you" specifically overstates the individual-recognition angle, since the mosquito is learning an odor profile that other people could share.