Abstract
The parasites that cause malaria depend on Anopheles mosquitoes for transmission; because of this, mosquito population dynamics are a key determinant of malaria risk. Development and survival rates of both the Anopheles mosquitoes and the Plasmodium parasites that cause malaria depend on temperature, making this a potential driver of mosquito population dynamics and malaria transmission. We developed a temperature-dependent, stage-structured delayed differential equation model to better understand how climate determines risk. Including the full mosquito life cycle in the model reveals that the mosquito population abundance is more sensitive to temperature than previously thought because it is strongly influenced by the dynamics of the juvenile mosquito stages whose vital rates are also temperature-dependent. Additionally, the model predicts a peak in abundance of mosquitoes old enough to vector malaria at more accurate temperatures than previous models. Our results point to the importance of incorporating detailed vector biology into models for predicting the risk for vector borne diseases.
Highlights
Mosquitoes are very efficient vectors of human diseases and are responsible for transmitting some of the most devastating diseases today
We propose that a disconnect exists between classic model predictions and observed epidemiology that is caused by mosquito population dynamics that depend on ambient environmental conditions and are strongly influenced by juvenile stage dynamics
We explored the effects of temperature and juvenile stage dynamics on adult age structure because it is an important determinant of population vectorial capacity
Summary
Mosquitoes are very efficient vectors of human diseases and are responsible for transmitting some of the most devastating diseases today. The mosquito lifecycle is generally ignored because eggs, larvae and pupae are not involved in the transmission cycle This is a useful simplification of the system but the results of these models do not predict malaria intensity in most endemic regions [14]. There have been exceptions to this generalization, with some models focusing on the mosquito population, and/or the influence of environmental drivers, such as temperature and rainfall [8,15,16,17,18,19,20] Of these models, the ones that explicitly include temperature predict a peak in abundance of vectors at temperatures that are higher than those observed to occur in conjunction with malaria transmission in the field [54]. We propose that a disconnect exists between classic model predictions and observed epidemiology that is caused by mosquito population dynamics that depend on ambient environmental conditions and are strongly influenced by juvenile stage dynamics
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