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When they’re not sucking the blood of animals, sand flies have a fondness for munching on the marijuana plant (Cannabis sativa), new research suggests.
An international team of scientists found that in proportion to its abundance, Cannabis sativa was consumed by sand flies much more frequently than expected, suggesting it was highly attractive to the insects.
According to a paper published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the findings could have implications for controlling the spread of diseases that sand flies—which are found across the globe—transmit.
Female sand flies suck the blood of vertebrates in order to provide the necessary protein for their eggs to mature. During this process, the flies can transmit pathogens to humans, causing diseases such as bartonellosis and leishmaniasis—which infect between 4 million and 12 million people around the world, resulting in 20,000 to 50,000 deaths annually.
In addition to sucking on blood, both females and males eat sugars from plants as a source of energy. These meals may come in the form of sugary solutions such as nectar or plant sap—which the flies can access by piercing leaves and stems with their needle-like mouthparts.
As a result, the availability of their preferred plants can influence where and when sand flies are distributed. This, consequently, helps researchers to identify areas that are at higher risk of infection from the diseases they transmit.
For the study—led by Ibrahim Abbasia from the Institute for Medical Research Israel-Canada and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem—the researchers used next-generation gene-sequencing techniques to determine the types of plant meals that the flies were eating.
The team trapped sand flies in five unique regions—across Brazil, Ethiopia, Kazakhstan and Israel/Palestine—and tested them, finding that they ingested a variety of plants. According to the badysis, the most commonly consumed plant in four of the five sites was Cannabis sativa, despite its apparent lack of abundance in the areas studied.
While the authors could only speculate as to why the sand flies had such a preference for eating marijuana plants, the findings could provide a potential new avenue for controling sand fly populations and mitigating the spread of disease.
“A novel approach for controlling blood-sucking mosquitoes and sand flies exploits their plant feeding habit by utilizing attractive toxic sugar baits [ATSBs] that emit olfactory cues to attract sand flies and mosquitoes,” the authors wrote in the study. By adding cannabis extracts to these ATSBs, researchers could improve their effectiveness for controlling disease-spreading insect populations, the authors suggest.
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