This is scientific American 60 second science.

I'm Christopher Intagiyata.

It's bad enough the mosquitoes suck our blood and sometimes pass on disease,

but there's more.

They can actually give you a disease. pass on disease, but there's more.

They can actually give you a disease and pee on you at the same time,

so adding insult to injury, if you will.

Jared Denton, a pharmacologist at Vanderbilt University Medical Center.

If you look up almost any picture on Google of a mosquito taking a blood meal,

you will see a clear drop of the fluid hanging out of the the mosquito, and that's actually the urine

that the mosquito has made from your blood.

That pee production is vital to the mosquito's survival,

because blood is salty.

And as these mosquitoes digest the red blood cells to get at the proteins and other nutrients

hiding there, they release potassium chloride chloride which can cause depolarization of the

membrane potential of excitable cells and induce excitotoxic death.

Translation not good. do excititotoxic death.

Translation, not good.

So mosquitoes and other blood suckers

have evolved a rapid diuretic process

to expel salt from their bodies using kidney-like structures. Basically, while still sucking blood, they start peeing.

But Denton and his colleagues found a way to block all that. They developed a chemical compound that blocks the bug salt ejecting pores.

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