Abstract
Female mosquitoes need a blood meal to reproduce, and in obtaining this essential nutrient they transmit deadly pathogens. Although crucial for the spread of mosquito-borne diseases, blood feeding remains poorly understood due to technological limitations. Indeed, studies often expose human subjects to assess biting behavior. Here, we present the biteOscope, a device that attracts mosquitoes to a host mimic which they bite to obtain an artificial blood meal. The host mimic is transparent, allowing high-resolution imaging of the feeding mosquito. Using machine learning, we extract detailed behavioral statistics describing the locomotion, pose, biting, and feeding dynamics of Aedes aegypti, Aedes albopictus, Anopheles stephensi, and Anopheles coluzzii. In addition to characterizing behavioral patterns, we discover that the common insect repellent DEET repels Anopheles coluzzii upon contact with their legs. The biteOscope provides a new perspective on mosquito blood feeding, enabling the high-throughput quantitative characterization of this lethal behavior.
Highlights
Blood feeding is essential for mosquito reproduction, and in the process mosquitoes transmit myriad pathogens to their host
We demonstrate that the biteOscope is an effective instrument to study the behavior of several medically relevant species of mosquito and describe behavioral patterns of the two main vectors of dengue, Zika, and chikungunya virus (Aedes aegypti and Aedes albopictus), and two important malaria vectors (Anopheles coluzzii and Anopheles stephensi)
We provide evidence that DEET repels Anopheles coluzzii upon contact with their legs, demonstrating the utility of body part tracking to understand behaviors mediated by contact-dependent sensing
Summary
Blood feeding is essential for mosquito reproduction, and in the process mosquitoes transmit myriad pathogens to their (human) host. Despite being the focal point of pathogen transmission, many aspects of blood feeding remain ill understood. The steps that unfold after a mosquito has landed on a host, are much less understood. Mosquitoes exhibit exploratory bouts during which the legs and proboscis frequently contact the skin (Jones and Pilitt, 1973; De Jong and Knols, 1995; Clements, 2013). An increasing body of literature reports the presence of receptors involved in contact-dependent sensing on the legs and proboscis (Sparks et al, 2013; Matthews et al, 2019; Dennis et al, 2019), suggesting that these appendages evaluate the skin surface and serve an important role in bite-site selection. In addition to the body parts that come in contact with the skin surface, the skin piercing labrum serves as a chemosensory organ, guiding blood feeding in currently unknown ways (Lee, 1974; Werner-Reiss et al, 1999; Jové et al, 2020)
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