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The convenient, pocket-sized, battery-powered hoax

I like to think that I’m a reasonably open-minded person—neither credulous nor rigidly skeptical. When a friend of mine told me he saw ghosts, I didn’t try to convince him he was hallucinating; I believe that he had some sort of genuine experience for which the terminology and imagery of “ghosts” provided an appropriate description. I would be reluctant to say that what he saw were really spirits of the departed, but then, things are frequently not what they seem; lacking solid evidence one way or another, there’s no point in being dogmatic.

There are some things, though, that lots of people persist in believing in the face of serious counterevidence. I am speaking, of course, of the decades-old meme that you can keep mosquitos away by using a little electronic gadget that emits ultrasonic sound. Let me get straight to the point: they don’t work. They have been scientifically proven not to work again and again over a period of quite a few years. Yet somehow manufacturers keep making them and people keep buying them, because the claim that they should work seems so plausible (and because they get an astonishing number of fake 5-star reviews on Amazon). As a public service, then, I’d like to tell you the truth about ultrasonic mosquito repellers.

Animal Magnetism

I have always been popular with the girls—female mosquitoes, that is. I don’t know if it’s my charming demeanor or the irresistible smell of Earl Grey tea on my breath, but somehow, if there is a single mosquito buzzing around a crowd of a hundred people, it always manages to find me. My skin is quite sensitive to mosquito bites, too; they turn into big, ugly, insanely itchy welts that don’t go away for days. Fortunately, I live in an area where there are relatively few mosquitoes, but when I’m in, say, Costa Rica in the winter or Saskatchewan in the summer, mosquito avoidance is always a top priority. If I’m staying put, tactics like mosquito netting, citronella candles, and mosquito coils work well, but when I’m moving around there’s no good choice but to cover myself with some sort of mosquito repellent. DEET-based repellents, while effective, are greasy, smell horrible, and supposedly find their way into your bloodstream quite quickly, where they can’t be especially healthy. Newer, more natural alternatives are safer and less offensive to the senses, but it’s still no fun to smear the stuff all over my exposed skin (and keep reapplying every hour or so).

So one summer, I bought myself an ultrasonic mosquito repeller. The package claimed this tiny, battery-powered device was “safe and effective,” and I figured it was worth finding out if I could get relief without all the chemicals. When I took the device out of its package, the first thing I noticed was that it had not only an on-off switch but also a frequency dial. I thought that was odd; wasn’t it supposed to be some precise frequency that drove mosquitoes away? But perhaps I was just thinking about the device in a technologically unsophisticated way.

I took the repeller outside and went to an area that I knew to be popular with mosquitoes. I flipped the switch, and within a few seconds a mosquito approached me, hovering about a foot away. I slowly turned the dial from one frequency extreme to the other; the mosquito was unfazed. I thought it was perhaps a question of range, so I held the device as close as I could to the mosquito. Even an inch away, it had no effect. Finally the mosquito landed on the little black box in my hand and I decided the experiment had been definitively concluded.

Sales Pitch

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and numerous universities have performed tests to determine if or how well various ultrasonic repellers work. In most cases, the tests showed no difference between using the device and using no protection; in the least successful experiments, use of ultrasonic devices increased the number of bites. And the U.S. Federal Trade Commission has clamped down on manufacturers making unsupported claims about these products. So what makes people think they should work, and why don’t they?

Some animals are sensitive to sounds pitched higher than the range of human hearing; ultrasonic whistles are used when training dogs and circus animals, for example, and bats use echolocation to navigate and hunt. The theory behind ultrasonic mosquito repellers is that there is some frequency, or range of frequencies, that mosquitoes can hear—and find distasteful enough to stay away from. For example, some manufacturers claim their devices mimic the sound made by a male mosquito’s wings, the theory being that females who have already mated would try to stay away from them (though it turns out they do not). Others say their devices emit sounds at the same frequency as the wing beats of dragonflies or bats, the mosquitoes’ natural enemies. Unfortunately, the sounds made by dragonflies and bats have no effect on mosquito behavior in the real world. They don’t prevent mosquitoes from becoming lunch for their predators, and they don’t protect you from becoming dinner for the mosquitoes.

Ultrasonic mosquito repellers do one thing remarkably well, however: survive. They have maintained their uncanny ability to transfer money from the pockets of consumers into manufacturers’ bank accounts in the face of terrible odds. Alas, this is a meme that deserves to die. Save your money and rent a copy of The Sixth Sense or The Mosquito Coast.

Note: This is an updated version of an article that originally appeared on Interesting Thing of the Day on July 27, 2003, and again in a slightly revised form on September 5, 2004.

Image credit: Public Domain Files

Baked Alaska is one of a small class of magical desserts that are both hot and cold. To make a baked Alaska, you put a mound of hard ice cream on top of some sponge cake, cover the whole apparatus with a layer of meringue, and either pop it in an extremely hot oven very briefly, or use a kitchen blowtorch to caramelize the meringue. Either way, the ice cream stays cold and solid because the meringue serves as an insulator for the short period of time heat is applied. (Mexican fried ice cream gives you a similar effect with a different technique, and there are a few other clever ways of combining hot and cold in a single dish.) If you need to recover from Eat Brussels Sprouts Day, eating a baked Alaska is a dandy antidote.

Image credit: Isabelle Hurbain-Palatin [CC BY-SA 2.0], via Flickr

Taxidermy heaven in Paris

On a trip to Paris in 2003, a large number of transit and public utility workers were on strike. Strikes of this kind are extremely common in France; a week when no one is on strike would be considered strange. In any case, a lot of people weren’t showing up for work, either because the subways weren’t running or because they were participating in demonstrations on the streets. As a result, museums and other attractions were forced to scale back their hours of operation. After leaving the Musée d’Orsay early, we had some time to kill on the left bank, and we took the opportunity to look up a nearby shop Morgen had read about.

In Paris to the Moon, Adam Gopnik describes the five years he spent living as an expatriate in Paris along with his wife and young son. (Hey! I did that too!) One of their favorite places to go on rainy days was a strange and fascinating shop called Deyrolle on the Rue du Bac. Deyrolle could be described as a taxidermy shop, but that doesn’t begin to do it justice, and besides, taxidermy shops are not exactly a dime a dozen—especially in Paris.

The Dead Zone

When we arrived at Deyrolle, we couldn’t determine if it was even open for business. At street level, there were large glass display cases on either side of the door; beyond that, a dark foyer. There was no sign saying “Ouvert,” no lights on, no people, no signs of life. In fact that last point should have been the tip-off that everything was normal. We tried the door; it opened. There was a creaky old staircase ahead of us, and we tentatively mounted the stairs. When we got to the top we were greeted by the reassuring glow of fluorescent lights, and the somewhat less reassuring sight of a moose staring at us.

I had always thought of taxidermy as a craft marketed rather narrowly to hunters wishing to display their prized trophies. At Deyrolle, no animal is too exotic, or too ordinary, to be stuffed. You’ll walk past lions, tigers, zebras, and a giraffe, not to mention a polar bear, a hyena, a badger, and a baboon. But you’ll also find every imaginable barnyard animal, as well as birds, deer, rabbits, and so on. The animals are scattered throughout the store as though they were customers, and they are for the most part extremely lifelike, sometimes eerily so. Some of the more exotic animals are for display only, but most are available for sale or for rent. That’s right: you can rent a dead zebra, elephant, or bear for your next party.

Take This Pet and Stuff It

The shop was founded in 1831 by Emile Deyrolle, and it moved to its current location—the former home of Louis XIV’s banker—in 1881. It is now owned by a company called Le Prince Jardinier that runs a number of specialty household goods stores. Most of the people who walk into Deyrolle are there mainly to browse, though the store does a fairly brisk business in mounted butterflies, beetles, and other insects, as well as rocks, fossils, and a variety of educational products. It is, however, a functioning taxidermy operation, and for a few hundred euros you can have your household pet stuffed when it expires. Deyrolle politely declines requests by humans to have their mortal remains stuffed and mounted; I heartily agree with the wisdom of this policy.

When we first visited Deyrolle, it looked as if it had changed little in the last hundred-plus years. Like its products, it seemed to be in a perpetually immobile yet lifelike state. But on February 1, 2008 (just months after we moved to Paris), a major fire tragically destroyed a significant portion of Deyrolle’s collection. With the help of numerous generous artists, the building and much of its contents were quickly restored, and the shop reopened in May of that year. It’s now a little bit…shiny for my tastes (you can see for yourself in a virtual tour on Deyrolle’s website), but still as weird and endearing as ever.

Current laws make it virtually impossible for a taxidermist to obtain the kinds of large, exotic animals that were once Deyrolle’s main trade (there are some exceptions, such as animals that died of old age at a zoo). That’s probably just as well; it’s a rather discomfiting notion given modern sensibilities about wildlife preservation. But the store is still well worth a visit for the sheer strangeness of it all.

Note: This is an updated version of an article that originally appeared on Interesting Thing of the Day on October 9, 2003, and again in a slightly revised form on September 28, 2004.

Image credit: saragoldsmith [CC BY 2.0], via Flickr

Brussels sprouts were high on my “yucky” list as a kid, although—as is usually the case—I hadn’t ever tried them. Indeed, I somehow managed never to consume a Brussels sprout until well into my 40s. When I finally found myself in a restaurant with Brussels sprouts on my plate, I decided reluctantly to take the plunge, and…oh wow. This is what I’ve been missing all these years? I was shocked. They didn’t taste anything like I expected them to. They were amazing. And I’ve been eating them ever since. (They’re especially good roasted, with a bit of olive oil, salt, and bacon crumbles.) Interestingly, I had almost exactly the same experience, around the same time, with sauerkraut—and cabbage, after all, is a close relative of Brussels sprouts (the former is essentially a miniature version of the latter). I will be eating more today!

Image credit: Marco Verch [CC BY 2.0], via Flickr