Abstract
Mosquito host-seeking behavior and heterogeneity in host distribution are important factors in predicting the transmission dynamics of mosquito-borne infections such as dengue fever, malaria, chikungunya, and West Nile virus. We develop and analyze a new mathematical model to describe the effect of spatial heterogeneity on the contact rate between mosquito vectors and hosts. The model includes odor plumes generated by spatially distributed hosts, wind velocity, and mosquito behavior based on both the prevailing wind and the odor plume. On a spatial scale of meters and a time scale of minutes, we compare the effectiveness of different plume-finding and plume-tracking strategies that mosquitoes could use to locate a host. The results show that two different models of chemotaxis are capable of producing comparable results given appropriate parameter choices and that host finding is optimized by a strategy of flying across the wind until the odor plume is intercepted. We also assess the impact of changing the level of host aggregation on mosquito host-finding success near the end of the host-seeking flight. When clusters of hosts are more tightly associated on smaller patches, the odor plume is narrower and the biting rate per host is decreased. For two host groups of unequal number but equal spatial density, the biting rate per host is lower in the group with more individuals, indicative of an attack abatement effect of host aggregation. We discuss how this approach could assist parameter choices in compartmental models that do not explicitly model the spatial arrangement of individuals and how the model could address larger spatial scales and other probability models for mosquito behavior, such as Lévy distributions.
Highlights
The transmission of infectious agents is heterogeneous in the sense that the risk for infection and infectiousness are unevenly distributed over the population [1]
This heterogeneity is an important factor in predicting the spread of an infection; ignoring it may result in misleading inference about transmission dynamics by underestimating the probability that an infectious agent will persist [2]
In this study we focus on mosquito host-seeking behavior within meters of a host, motivated by indoor experiments involving mosquito-bird interactions [7]
Summary
The transmission of infectious agents is heterogeneous in the sense that the risk for infection and infectiousness are unevenly distributed over the population [1]. The spatial arrangement of hosts is likely to affect the spatial distribution of the odor plume and the mosquitoes’ ability to locate and feed on them. It may be easier for a mosquito to find a large roost of birds than to find an single bird. Unless the probability of finding a host is exactly proportional to the density of hosts, unevenly distributed contact rates on individual hosts, and heterogeneous disease transmission, will result. Understanding the dynamics of odor-driven mosquito-host interaction is fundamental to a detailed mechanistic understanding of mosquito-borne transmission
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