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10-Minute Presentation

Medical, Urban, and Veterinary Entomology

10-min: MUVE, Mosquito Biology and Ecology

Biomechanical constraints and trade-offs between sugar and blood feeding in mosquitoes

Tuesday, November 12, 2024
9:48 AM – 10:00 AM MST
Location: Phoenix Convention Center, 222 A
Oral Presentation
Disease-vector insects acquire nutrients from the food they ingest and can, in the process, transmit pathogens responsible for diseases that have epidemiological impacts on human populations. Surprisingly, little is known about the relationship between form and function in blood-sucking insects' feeding systems, as most research effort has revolved around pathogen transmission. Far less work has been done to understand the physiological and biomechanical characteristics of blood feeding and the adaptations associated with the evolutionary transition from nectar feeding to blood feeding. Mosquitoes feed on a wide range of hosts whose blood varies in temperature from warm to cold, including animals ranging from mammals to amphibians. However, blood feeding has only evolved in select mosquito taxa and only in females. In contrast, in some other species, both females and males feed solely on sugars from sources including nectar, sap and honeydew, that vary in physical properties. Thus, mosquitoes ingest fluids that differ widely in both viscosity and temperature. We hypothesize that mosquitoes have developed sex and species-specific mechanisms to deal with the challenges inherent to ingesting fluids across the broad range of properties exhibited by different sources. For this project, we used a multidisciplinary, convergent approach employing complementary experimental and computational methods to determine the biomechanical constraints and trade-offs underlying differences in fluid ingestion in mosquitoes. We focused on three mosquito species that feed on plant and animal hosts: Aedes aegypti, Culex quinquefasciatus and Toxorhynchites rutilus to expand our knowledge in the fields of biomechanics and disease vector biology.