Y chromosome controls mating behaviour on Anopheles mosquitoes.

Abstract

SEVERAL species of Culex and Anopheles mosquitoes differ in their ability to breed in a relatively small space under laboratory conditions. When paired matings or mass rearings are carried out in small laboratory cages, males of some species are able to copulate while those of others are not. These characteristics have been named respectively stenogamy and eurygamy and reflect the field requirement for a small or a large space to perform the pre-copulative flight1: in stenogamous species the male performs an almost stationary flight with short, quick movements followed by mating with the female which remains motionless on a wall; conversely, the males of eurigamous species form small swarms of several individuals into or near which the females fly and copulation takes place in flight. These behavioural characteristics are inherited and, although the dominance of stenogamy over eurygamy has been suggested2–5, previous data are inconclusive mainly because of the lack of informative F2 and backcross experiments5. In fact, in Anopheles, though all types of F1 hybrid females are fertile when backcrossed to the parental species, the F1 hybrid males are usually sterile5.