Abstract
BackgroundThe yellow fever mosquito, Aedes aegypti, is the principal vector of medically-important infectious viruses that cause severe illness such as dengue fever, yellow fever and Zika. The transmission potential of mosquitoes for these arboviruses is largely shaped by their life history traits, such as size, survival and fecundity. These life history traits, to some degree, depend on environmental conditions, such as larval and adult nutrition (e.g., nectar availability). Both these types of nutrition are known to affect the energetic reserves and life history traits of adults, but whether and how nutrition obtained during larval and adult stages have an interactive influence on mosquito life history traits remains largely unknown.ResultsHere, we experimentally manipulated mosquito diets to create two nutritional levels at larval and adult stages, that is, a high or low amount of larval food (HL or LL) during larval stage, and a good and poor adult food (GA or PA, represents normal or weak concentration of sucrose) during adult stage. We then compared the size, survival and fecundity of female mosquitoes reared from these nutritional regimes. We found that larval and adult nutrition affected size and survival, respectively, without interactions, while both larval and adult nutrition influenced fecundity. There was a positive relationship between fecundity and size. In addition, this positive relationship was not affected by nutrition.ConclusionsThese findings highlight how larval and adult nutrition differentially influence female mosquito life history traits, suggesting that studies evaluating nutritional effects on vectorial capacity traits should account for environmental variation across life stages.
Highlights
The yellow fever mosquito, Aedes aegypti, is the principal vector of medically-important infectious viruses that cause severe illness such as dengue fever, yellow fever and Zika
The yellow fever mosquito (Diptera: Culicidae), Aedes aegypti (Linnaeus, 1762), is the principal vector of several arthropod-borne viruses such as dengue, yellow fever, chikungunya and Zika, which continue to impose a heavy burden on public health globally
Eclosed adults from each larval nutritional treatment were maintained in paperboard cages (20.5 cm height × 18.5 cm diameter) and randomly assigned to one of two adult nutritional regimes with different food quality: a well-nourished treatment with ad libitum access to a 10% sucrose solution, representing good adult nutrition; or a malnourished treatment with ad libitum access to 1% sucrose solution, representing poor adult nutrition
Summary
The yellow fever mosquito, Aedes aegypti, is the principal vector of medically-important infectious viruses that cause severe illness such as dengue fever, yellow fever and Zika. Dengue virus (DENV), for example, is estimated to cause 390 million cases of human infection each year, 96 million of which have clinical manifestations [6] These arboviruses have been re-emerging in many regions and expanding their ranges across the globe, partly due to urbanization and subsequent expansion of the distribution of Ae. aegypti [7]. Yan et al Frontiers in Zoology (2021) 18:10 an equation that isolates the entomological parameters from the basic reproduction number of a vector-borne disease (e.g., malaria [10]), often focusing on those parameters that can be measured under field conditions It is a tremendously useful measure of transmission potential, which can guide implementation of control measures and increase our understanding of risk. Despite the importance of life history traits, relatively few studies have examined how these traits can be influenced by the different environments experienced by mosquitoes across their developmental stages
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