Mosquitos are so smart they're learning how to avoid pesticides used to kill them, study says

Mosquitos learned to avoid pesticides after a single non-lethal exposure, a study published Thursday in Nature found.

Mosquitoes may be smarter than we think, and that could make getting rid of them and the diseases they carry even more difficult, according to new research.

Scientists who studied two species of mosquitoes that spread diseases such as dengue, Zika and West Nile fever -- Aedes aegypti and Culex quinquefasciatus -- found that the females learned to avoid pesticides after a single non-lethal exposure, a study published Thursday in Nature found.

The researchers exposed the female mosquitoes to non-lethal doses of common anti-mosquito pesticides and found that mosquitoes that had been pre-exposed to a pesticide avoided passing through a pesticide-treated net in order to reach a food source at a higher rate than those who had not been pre-exposed, according to the paper.

In addition, the survival rate of pre-exposed mosquitoes was more than double that of mosquitoes that had not been pre-exposed.