Two or three times a month, Leslie B. Vosshall, the Robin Chemers Neustein Professor in the Laboratory of Neurogenetics and Behavior, at the Rockefeller University, is required to feed the subjects under inquiry in her lab. In order to do so, she rolls up her sleeve and inserts her arm into the netting cage in which the creatures in question, mosquitoes, are kept. It’s not unusual for her to get two hundred and fifty bites in a few minutes, she explained the other day, with blasé good humor.

Vosshall is attempting to discover why some people seem more attractive to mosquitoes than others. “Some people are mosquito magnets—I think this has been reported anecdotally ever since there have been people,” she said. Vosshall herself is not particularly attractive to mosquitoes, unless she is sticking her arm into a cage of them. But last week, with mosquito season well under way, she visited Brooklyn to discuss the implications of her research for those New Yorkers for whom being made a meal of is an annual blight rather than a professional obligation.

First stop: the Union Street Bridge over the Gowanus Canal. Vosshall, who is a tall forty-six-year-old with long light-brown hair, was dressed boldly, under the circumstances, in a short black-and-white shift that covered her arms but exposed her legs. Native mosquitoes, Culex pipiens, are more likely to go for the face and the neck, she explained; it’s the mosquitoes that carry malaria, Anopheles gambiae, that like biting the feet. For illustrative purposes, Vosshall had brought along a test tube containing fetid water in which centimetre-long larvae frantically squiggled.

She peered from the bridge down into the water below, where leaf litter floated amid iridescent patches of kerosene. The stagnant edges of the canal, she noted, might provide a good breeding ground, as would pools of water in the hollows of wooden pilings. “Mosquitoes don’t like water too clean—Poland Spring is not going to be attractive,” she said. The reported presence of fish in the canal would, however, be some deterrent. “Fish are predators, so if you are a good mosquito mom you are not going to lay your eggs there,” Vosshall said. It is a little-known fact that only female mosquitoes bite. “The males are peaceable—they feed on flowers,” she said, conjuring the image of billions of teeny-tiny Ferdinand the Bulls, idling the days away among the milkweed.

Next stop: the shady Fort Greene back yard of a writer who has been a magnet for mosquitoes since childhood. Having cased the joint for standing water—a single empty plant dish with an inch of liquid was found, and declared uninfested—Vosshall explained that there are numerous theories about what draws mosquitoes to one person and not another. “There’s something about the composition of the blood—substance X—that they can figure out,” she said. One study has shown that mosquitoes prefer to bite people who have been drinking beer over those who have been imbibing water. The allure of wine for mosquitoes remains, unfortunately, unstudied.

Vosshall dismissed much of the folk wisdom traded among residents of brownstone Brooklyn about effective mosquito deterrence. A fire pit? “You can confuse mosquitoes with fire, but it has to be a smelly, smoky fire—you can’t have one of those fancy hotel-fire displays,” she said. Growing lemon balm or planting marigolds? “People do use botanicals, but you have to have a lot of plants,” she said. She did endorse the use of the Mosquito Magnet, a device that first attracts mosquitoes by producing carbon dioxide and heat, then fatally sucks them up. “But it’s a little bit dangerous,” she added. “All the mosquitoes from far and wide will come, and you are gambling that they will be more attracted to the machine than they are to you.”

If you should get bitten, the most effective treatment Vosshall has found is to immediately run the welt under the hottest water tolerable. How this works is as mysterious as the logic of mosquitoes’ blood preferences. “The mosquitoes leave a protein on the skin, so it could be that the hot water cooks it, like cooking an egg,” she suggested. “That’s one idea. The other idea is that you are exchanging one form of pain for another.”?