This is scientific American's 60 second science. I'm Christopher in Tagyatta.

In Africa's battle against malaria, two low-tech tactics, insecticides and bed nets, have done a decent job killing off mosquitoes.

But it's mainly one species that's been affected, and that's a species called

Enophilus gambit, often referred to as the African malaria mosquito.

Ricardo.

Ricardo Nell, a chemical ecologist at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences.

He says, despite that success, the problem is far from solved.

For one, mosquitoes are developing resistance to insecticides.

And two, there are many other species that can spread the disease,

including one that's common in the horn of Africa,

anophiles arabiensis. Unlike the pickier anophiles gambee, its palate is wide-ranging.

Arabiensis sucks the blood of cattle, sheep, goats, but not chickens.

Chickens like mosquitoes, so they will actively feed on mosquitoes and other insects. So avoiding chickens could be a way of

surviving and evolving way of smelling the chickens could be an early warning system for them.

And it turns out that aversion to chickens can be used against the insects.

Ignel and his colleagues isolated chemical compounds from chicken feathers

and dispensed them next to a human sleeping under a bed net, a human

lure. And they found that fewer mosquitoes came round for a snack due to the repellent chemicals.

The findings appear in the Malaria Journal.

Ignel says this chicken cologne won't be immediately available.

Ideally, the world would be like that, that we can actually bottle it up and send it off and they don't have to pay anything

but that's not the case usually. Luckily there's an equally effective substitute.

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