Thursday, July 06, 2006

Rotten bananas attract mosquitoes

I had one of those "scientific observation" moments early this morning.

At 3:00 am in the morning, I went to get a late night snack. To my surprise, I find a whole bunch of mosquitoes gathered together near my banana bread. Great! Someone probably left the door open or something earlier today.

I hate mosquitoes and I don't like them biting me or my pregnant wife. So I killed about 20 of them and after my hands turned redder than a tomato, I quit. But I observed something else after I was done chasing mosquitoes in the middle of the morning. I saw another group of them (roughly 15 or more) sitting on rotten bananas. This was roughly about 5 feet away from the banana bread.

So rotten bananas had mosquitoes on them and banana bread had mosquitoes on them. Out of all the spots in the house, why do these two items attract mosquitoes? I scared them away from both areas again and when I came back a few minutes later, they came back to the same two places.

My conclusion? Something in bananas attract mosquitoes. Is it the potassium perhaps? Who knows. But there's a lot of folk lore out there about bananas attracting mosquitoes, I think this is one of the few instances that this was actually observed.

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