Speaker
Description
Female mosquitoes obtain a blood meal necessary for reproduction through a fascinating behavioral trajectory that culminates in the mosquito bite. The transmission of a variety of pathogens is an unfortunate by-product of this behavior. Blood feeding is contingent on the mosquito's integration of environmental stimuli and its physiological state. Pathogens infecting a mosquito impact physiology and may alter its sensory cue integration, presenting the opportunity for the pathogen to influence its transmission by affecting the blood-feeding behavior of its vector. Using custom-built high-throughput behavioral assays, we explore this hypothesis in dengue virus infected Aedes aegypti and several Anopheles species infected with Plasmodium falciparum and P. vivax. We combine the biteOscope—a transparent skin mimic allowing direct quantification of mosquito biting behavior—and deep learning-based image analysis to obtain detailed behavior statistics of >2500 blood-feeding mosquitoes providing a rich perspective on activity patterns, probing behavior, and blood-feeding dynamics. Comparative statistical analysis reveals that the behavioral changes pathogens may induce differ markedly between mosquito-pathogen systems. Dengue virus, for instance, enhances Ae. aegypti's propensity to engage in blood feeding nearly doubling the likelihood of infected mosquitoes to obtain a blood meal, whereas e.g. P. vivax has virtually no impact on the behavior of An. stephensi. Using an epidemiological toy-model, we explore the impact of the observed behavioral alterations on pathogen transmission.
