The surprising beauty of mosquitos | Felix Hol

Felix Hol (0:00)

In order to actually understand the animal well, you cannot just think like, oh, it's a super annoying animal that I hate, right? You kind of like have to crawl inside the skin of the subject that you're trying to understand. I think a certain fascination, or maybe if you would want to call it love, is at least in my case, required to really get deeply into understanding how it works.

Elise Hu (0:25)

You're listening to TED Talks Daily, where we bring you new ideas to spark your curiosity every day. I'm your host, Elise Hu.

That is mosquito biotechnologist Felix Hol. And yes, he really does mean love. Most of us have exactly one feeling about mosquitoes, and it isn't affection. But Felix's fascination comes with a serious purpose. He believes that the better we understand how mosquitoes find us, bite us, and adapt to us, the better our chances of stopping the diseases they spread, which take an enormous and growing toll across the world.

Felix Hol (1:00)

About half a million people die of a mosquito-borne disease each year, and the number is actually rising. Since they don't affect people in, for instance, Europe or North America that much, they seem to be getting much less attention than they maybe should.

Elise Hu (1:15)

Felix is a TED Fellow, part of a program for early-stage innovators that TED supports. It's a community of more than 500 fellows around the globe whose work reaches more than 200 million people a year. They're not just improving broken systems, they're building a better future for all of us.

In Felix's case, he's challenging the idea that we can simply out-spray mosquitoes. And in this episode, he takes us into his lab in the Netherlands, where his team builds cheap, open-source tools to film and study mosquitoes up close and shows just how quickly they adapt to whatever we throw at them.

Felix Hol (1:47)

Since the mosquitoes aren't stupid either, and they get hungry if they can't bite people because they're sleeping on their bed nets, mosquitoes are now actually shifting their behavioral pattern. So they're biting earlier in the evening, later in the morning.

Elise Hu (2:00)

After Felix shares his story, he speaks with TED Fellows program director, Lily James Olds. They get into how a messy lab accident led to one of his favorite inventions, a surprising discovery about two malaria-carrying mosquitoes in Uganda, and why climate change and human travel are helping mosquitoes spread to new places. That's all coming up right after a short break.

And now our TED story and conversation of the day.

Felix Hol (2:35)

I think a lot of mosquitoes are actually quite pretty. If you put a mosquito under the stereoscope and you get to like zoom in, you first see like the whole body and then you zoom in more and more and more. You get to the eyes, for instance, you know, they have all these little facets and it's just really beautiful how those are arranged. You can zoom in even more on the mouth parts and you see like all the scales and the hair sticking out. I think that just looks amazing. You know, it's a slender, beautiful insect.

My name is Felix Hol and I'm a mosquito biotechnologist.

Everybody like has some relation to mosquitoes, right? Most people hate them. In a way, they are scary and dangerous, not the animal itself, but you know, when a mosquito takes a blood meal from a person and that person would be carrying a particular disease, then a mosquito can get infected by that pathogen and it could transmit it to another human. So that aspect of the mosquito, yeah, of course, can be as dangerous, can also be a bit scary.

They have this humongous impact on society, on humans, but while they're omnipresent, there's a lot of things that we really don't understand about them. In order to actually understand the animal well, you cannot just think like, oh, it's a super annoying animal that I hate, right? You kind of have to crawl inside the skin of the subject that you're trying to understand. I think a certain fascination, or maybe if you would want to call it love, is at least in my case required to really get deeply into understanding how it works. There's about 3,500 species, but only a small subset, around 90, actually feed on humans. So basically, I'm sitting here, breathing out a bunch of CO2, and mosquitoes can really smell that from far away, really like tens of meters. That activates them, they start flying, and then they kind of like surge and cast through a CO2 plume. When they get closer to me, they switch to more like smelling body odors, so basically just my sweaty smell. But when they get even closer, the heat actually becomes, or just the body heat that my body radiates, that becomes a much more important cue, and of course also visual cues. They also have taste and smell receptors on their feet, so when they're walking on your skin, they can actually just taste the surface of your skin. The mosquito will tap the skin with the proboscis, and then it will slide in both a food canal and a slavery duct. And the food canal will then actually just in your skin search for a blood vessel, and it will start drinking.