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The secret? Do not give it too much space!
Mosquitoes are notorious pathogens. They spread serious diseases such as malaria or dengue fever. Fortunately, promising methods are currently under study in the laboratory to prevent the spread of these diseases. And many of these methods are focused – unsurprisingly – on the propagators: mosquitoes. For example, researchers have imagined sterilizing mosquitoes in the laboratory in the wild. Mosquitoes mate with females, but this does not lead to offspring. The population is therefore decreasing rapidly. Another promising approach is that researchers infect mosquitoes in the laboratory with a bacterium that guarantees that they can not reproduce and / or are unable to carry pathogens. Or we generate sterile mosquitoes by genetic manipulation.
Send
If you choose one of these methods, you will sooner or later be faced with a challenge: you need laboratory-adapted mosquitoes – with thousands if not millions at a time – to pass to nature. And how can you do it better? Scientists have now studied the issue and revealed in the newspaper Journal of Insect Science the best way to send a mosquito.
Experiment
Researchers base their conclusions on experiments. During these experiments, they took a small tube and introduced a number of x mosquitoes. The researchers then imitated the shipping process. They put the tubes in Styrofoam and added a cooling element, after which they were sent from Las Cruces, New Mexico to Davis, California. As soon as the mosquitoes arrived there, it was checked how many of them were still alive. Surprisingly, mosquito survival probabilities increased dramatically as researchers stopped multiplying mosquitoes in the tube. The optimal amount of mosquitoes? 240 pieces per cubic centimeter! For those who can not really imagine this: in such a situation, the mosquitoes are really close to each other. It is roughly comparable to nearly 1200 mosquitoes on a teaspoon that try to load.
Vibrations
"The high mortality among the less tight mosquitoes in our experience was unexpected," says researcher Immo Hansen. "We believe that vibrations during transport – and especially during air travel – affect mosquitoes less densely charged than denser ones."
The mosquitoes were completely intact at 240 copies in one. cubic inches of space have not been stopped. Many mosquitoes appeared to have lost scales during transport and others had damaged wings. But otherwise, they were still fit. Further research will have to show if the mosquitoes are really as fit as they seem.
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