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Mosquitoes may surf winds above Africa more than we realized

Author: Susan Milius / Source: Science News

mosquito
BITE BEFORE FLIGHT An unexpectedly high percentage of adult female mosquitoes were collected in air currents at least 40 meters above the ground in Mali.

VANCOUVER — Adult female mosquitoes could be surfing air currents high above the West African Sahel. This traffic, at least 40 meters up, might be troubling news for efforts to control malaria.

Traps attached to balloons flown over villages in Mali caught close to 3,000 mosquitoes at heights between 40 and 290 meters above the ground, where winds might blow the insects long distances. That sample, collected in multiple all-night sessions spaced over three years, was roughly 80 percent adult female, the mosquito life stage that can transmit malaria.

Some of the collected species are known to be capable of spreading malaria, said medical entomologist Tovi Lehmann in his preview of trap data November 14 at the 2018 joint annual meeting of three Canadian and American entomological societies. But Lehmann, of the National Institutes of Health in Rockville, Md., does not know yet whether the females were carrying the malaria parasite when they were caught by a balloon trap.

There’s been debate about what, if anything, such windborne mosquitoes might contribute to Africa’s patterns of entrenched malaria and high death tolls from the disease. That’s because “mosquitoes are generally thought to have short dispersal distances,” said veterinary entomologist Christopher Sanders of the Pirbright Institute in England who was not…

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