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by fooqux 21 days ago
I couldn't tell from the paper, but perhaps I missed it. Is this learned behavior hereditary?
1 comments

It doesn't seem the case; the study was made purely on behavioral conditioning. And mosquitoes don't live very long, so it's unlikely they'd learn this in practice, outside of a very controlled environment.

But there's a natural selective pressure, and it's plausible that mosquitoes would eventually evolve their sensors to become attracted to DEET, over multiple generations. And with each generation lasting only 20-30 days and a single female mosquito laying 300-500 eggs in total, they can evolve orders of magnitude faster than us.