Food recognition in hematophagous insects

BARROZO, ROMINA B

Current Opinion in Insect Science

Elsevier BV

Año: 2019

2214-5745

Hematophagous insects use heat, odours and humidity emitted by vertebratehosts to find them in space and time. Once they reach a host, they integrate multimodalinformation from its skin, and decide whether to bite or not. If skinconditions fulfil the insect?s expectations, it bites and pumps a smallquantity of blood. Again, only if the sampled blood fulfils the insect´sfeeding requirements, it continues with a full ingestion. Taste is involved inboth timely linked evaluation processes viacontact chemoreceptors located in different parts of their bodies, driving jointlyfood acceptance or rejection. However, the whole picture of how blood-suckinginsects evaluate the quality of a potential host is poorly understood. Here, I summarizethe actual knowledge about the feeding decision-making in blood-sucking insects.Being typically involved in the transmission of diseases to humans or livestock,a deeper understanding about factors affecting an essential process as feedingin these insects could help us to find new strategies to reduce interactions.