Could Skrillex’s Dubstep Music Be Used As A Mosquito Repellant?

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 21^st Century.