Ecological and Behavioral Factors to Aid in Modelling Environmental Mosquito Control & to Design Larval Robots

Abstract

Abstract: The anatomical location of human pathogens in mosquitoes ranging from Plasmodium, Wucheriria, flavivirus and other viruses are in salivary glands of the mosquitoes which is important for transmission. Further Dengue virus (DENV) is known to exist from egg stage to adult stage in mosquitoes. The other important fact in mosquito borne transmission is the blood meal that renders them capable of egg laying. Hence hormonal, ecological, behavioral control of mosquitoes with environmental thyroxine, larval behavior pattern, predatory dragonfly larva, air turbulence g-force was studied. Environmental contamination of shallow water bodies with animal urine could introduce thyroxine in water bodies where mosquito larva is breeding. Modeling such an outcome, the results indicated significance influence of thyroxine on mosquito larva resulting in alteration of eclosed mosquito size, weight, sex ratio, antennal hairs. The second mode of ecological control with predatory dragonfly larva in water bodies modeled with introduced coal resulted in excellent mosquito larval control. The third mode of using air turbulence g-force (with home appliances like ceiling fan) induced mosquito control was also found to be effective in reducing the no of hatched larva when the adult mosquitoes are exposed to g-force but it did increase the longevity of male mosquitoes. Further based on mosquito larval behavior pattern, it was observed that mosquito larva does have the tendency to be social and tend to meet each other in water bodies that can be used for mosquito control by design of larval robots that can deliver larvicidal compounds on one-to-one basis.