Food recognition in hematophagous insects

Hematophagous insects use heat, odors, visual cues and humidity emitted by vertebrate hosts to find them in space and time. Once they reach a host, they integrate multimodal information from its skin, and decide whether to bite or not. If skin conditions fulfil the insect’s expectations, it bites and pumps a small quantity of blood. Again, only if the sampled blood fulfils the insect’s feeding requirements, it continues with a full ingestion....