Too "sexy" for the field? Paired measures of laboratory and semi-field performance highlight variability in the apparent mating fitness of Aedes aegypti transgenic strains.

Background: Evaluating and improving mating success and competitive ability of laboratory-reared transgenic mosquito strains will enhance the effectiveness of proposed disease-control strategies that involve deployment of transgenic strains. Two components of the mosquito rearing process, larval diet quantity and aquatic environment - which are linked to physiological and behavioural differences in adults - are both relatively easy to manipulate. In mosquitoes, as for many other arthropod species, the quality of the juvenile habitat is strongly associated with adult fitness characteristics, such as longevity and fecundity.

Male competition and the evolution of mating and life-history traits in experimental populations of Aedes aegypti.

Aedes aegypti is an important disease vector and a major target of reproductive control efforts. We manipulated the opportunity for sexual selection in populations of Ae. aegypti by controlling the number of males competing for a single female.

Female resistance and harmonic convergence influence male mating success in Aedes aegypti.

Despite the importance of mosquito mating biology to reproductive control strategies, a mechanistic understanding of individual mating interactions is currently lacking. Using synchronised high-speed video and audio recordings, we quantified behavioural and acoustic features of mating attempts between tethered female and free-flying male Aedes aegypti. In most couplings, males were actively displaced by female kicks in the early phases of the interaction, while flight cessation prior to adoption of the pre-copulatory mating pose also inhibited copulation.

Emergent acoustic order in arrays of mosquitoes.

The yellow fever mosquito Aedes aegypti forms aerial swarms that serve as mating aggregations [1]. Despite lacking the remarkable collective order of other animal ensembles, such as fish and birds [2], the kinematic properties of these swarms bear the hallmarks of local interaction and global cohesion [3,4]. However, the mechanisms responsible for collective behaviour in mosquitoes are not well understood.

Quantitative analysis of harmonic convergence in mosquito auditory interactions.

This article analyses the hearing and behaviour of mosquitoes in the context of inter-individual acoustic interactions. The acoustic interactions of tethered live pairs of Aedes aegypti mosquitoes, from same and opposite sex mosquitoes of the species, are recorded on independent and unique audio channels, together with the response of tethered individual mosquitoes to playbacks of pre-recorded flight tones of lone or paired individuals. A time-dependent representation of each mosquito's non-stationary wing beat frequency signature is constructed, based on Hilbert spectral analysis.

Time-frequency composition of mosquito flight tones obtained using Hilbert spectral analysis.

Techniques for estimating temporal variation in the frequency content of acoustic tones based on short-time fast Fourier transforms are fundamentally limited by an inherent time-frequency trade-off. This paper presents an alternative methodology, based on Hilbert spectral analysis, which is not affected by this weakness, and applies it to the accurate estimation of mosquito wing beat frequencies. Mosquitoes are known to communicate with one another via the sounds generated by their flapping wings.

Global and regional analysis of climate and human drivers of wildfire.

Identifying and quantifying the statistical relationships between climate and anthropogenic drivers of fire is important for global biophysical modelling of wildfire and other Earth system processes. This study used regression tree and random forest analysis on global data for various climatic and human variables to establish their relative importance. The main interactions found at the global scale also apply regionally: greatest wildfire burned area is associated with high temperature (> 28 °C), intermediate annual rainfall (350-1100 mm), and prolonged dry periods (which varies by region).