Natural History Wanderings

It interferes with insects’ ability to smell.

Leslie Vosshall of the Rockefeller University in New York and her colleagues have done research that  shows that DEET interferes with the normal activity of smell-sensing neurons in insect antennae (which Vosshall says are the equivalent of their noses). The insects receive scrambled messages about the odours around them, so they are less effectively attracted to their target. Read the full story at Nature News Blog: DEET scrambles insects’ sense of smell.

If you are going to be in any serious mosquito areas this summer, you will find nothing works as well as DEET.