Abstract
Small, flying insects continue to pose great risks to both human health and agricultural production throughout the world, so there remains a compelling need to develop new vector and pest control approaches. Here, we examined the use of short (<25 ms) laser pulses to kill or disable anesthetized female Anopheles stephensi mosquitoes, which were chosen as a representative species. The mortality of mosquitoes exposed to laser pulses of various wavelength, power, pulse duration, and spot size combinations was assessed 24 hours after exposure. For otherwise comparable conditions, green and far-infrared wavelengths were found to be more effective than near- and mid-infrared wavelengths. Pulses with larger laser spot sizes required lower lethal energy densities, or fluence, but more pulse energy than for smaller spot sizes with greater fluence. Pulse duration had to be reduced by several orders of magnitude to significantly lower the lethal pulse energy or fluence required. These results identified the most promising candidates for the lethal laser component in a system being designed to identify, track, and shoot down flying insects in the wild.
Highlights
Small, flying insects continue to pose great risks to both human health and agricultural production throughout the world, so there remains a compelling need to develop new vector and pest control approaches
Dosing experiments were first carried out at 532 nm using the setup shown in Fig. 1
As the optical pulse energy per unit area, fluence can be varied by changing either the beam spot size or the pulse energy, which is the product of optical power and pulse duration
Summary
Small, flying insects continue to pose great risks to both human health and agricultural production throughout the world, so there remains a compelling need to develop new vector and pest control approaches. The work by African governments and international organizations to distribute insecticide-treated nets (ITNs) and to promote indoor residual spraying (IRS) have reduced malaria deaths to approximately 1/2 to 1/3 the peak number of 1.8 million in 20044 The benefits of these efforts appear to have leveled off, as ITN’s only work indoors and often get damaged or repurposed, leading to modest overall usage in some endemic regions[2]. The system would work by first using a camera system with near-infrared illumination to identify target insects in an active region It would discriminate targets from non-targets based on size and, if needed, wingbeat frequency[27] and/or contextual information like time of day. Once a target is identified, the www.nature.com/scientificreports/
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