It’s amazing how much manipulation is going on in parasites. It would be hard to find a case where there wasn’t some manipulation.

And manipulation appears to be an obvious way to do it.

The fact that the parasite manipulates the mosquito to this extent can help to explain the incredibly intense transmission of malaria.

Gametocyte-infected children attracted about twice as many mosquitoes as either uninfected ones or ones infected with non-transmissible stages. The results really jump out.

I think the main problem with the previous studies is that they couldn’t really tease apart the effect of infection and the intrinsic differences in attractiveness among people.