Is there any truth on the recent discovery by scientists that
musician Skrillex’s dubstep music could actually be used as a mosquito
repellant?
By: Ringo Bones
I don’t know if this was discovered purely by accident or a
really funny April Fool’s Joke but an international team of scientists recently
announced that dubstep music by the musician known as Skrillex was shown to
repel mosquitoes. According to a recent scientific study that got widespread
press attention back in April 1, 2019, a new way to avoid mosquito bites is to
listen to electronic music – specifically dubstep music and specifically by the
U.S. artist known as Skrillex.
In an experiment that used electronic music to test whether
it has “mosquito repellant properties” where an international team of scientists
subjected adults of the species Aedes aegypti – popularly known as the yellow
fever mosquito – to various types and genres of electronic dance music to see
whether it could work as a sonic mosquito repellant. Scary Monsters And Nice
Sprites, a track by Skrillex which features on his Grammy-award winning album
of the same name was chosen because of its mix of very high and very low
frequencies.
According to the results published in the journal Acta
Tropica, female mosquitoes were “entertained” by the track’s wide range of high
and low frequency sounds and attacked hosts later and less often in comparison
to pregnant female mosquitoes on the prowl in a dubstep-free environment. Scientists
said “the occurrence of blood feeding activity was lower when Skrillex’s music
was being played.”
The scientists also found out that mosquitoes exposed to the
song had sex “far less often” than mosquitoes not exposed to Skrillex’s music
and they also state that “the observation that such music can delay host
attack, reduce blood feeding, and disrupt mating provides new avenues for the
development of music-based personal protective and control measures against
Aedes-borne diseases”.
Entomologists – especially those that study various species
of mosquitoes – had known that various sound frequencies can affect the
behavior of mosquitoes about the same time when radio sets with sufficiently
loud speaker systems became widespread domestic appliances near the end of the
1920s. And for this reason, various ways to repel mosquitoes of varying effectiveness
already exists since the “Roaring 20s” but it seems that Skrillex’s dubstep
music is so far the most effective.
Most people living in swampy areas know that mosquitoes hum
but this is only audible when they close enough to our ears. But unbeknown to
most people, it is only the female mosquito that bites and only when they are
pregnant and when female mosquitoes are pregnant and hungry for human blood,
they avoid male mosquitoes like hell. One suggested method to avoid being
bitten by hordes of female mosquitoes is to keep a swarm of male mosquitoes
with you, but this is easier said than done because – unless you are an
entomologist specializing in various species of mosquitoes, it is quite hard to
distinguish between male and female mosquitoes.
As far back as the late 1920s, various electronic
tone-generating devices that mimic the hum of the male mosquito was shown to be
very effective in preventing humans from being bitten by the pregnant female
mosquito if they stay within a certain radius of the tone generator. These tone
generators can generate sine waves between 5,000 Hz to 14,000 Hz a range of
sounds where different species of male mosquitoes are known to “vocalize”. But
if Skrillex’s dubstep music is more effective than this in repelling pregnant
mosquitoes, then maybe portable boom-boxes are now the most effective mosquito
repellant in the 21st Century.
