Presenter(s): Danielia Lewis
Faculty Mentor(s): William Bradshaw & Chris Holzapfel-Bradshaw
Oral Session 1 O
Mosquito bites cause over one million deaths per year by spreading blood-borne diseases like malaria, and yellow fever. Synchronous emergence in the spring facilitates males finding mates and also saturating the ability of predators to consume all of the emerging insects (predator satiation). With mass swarming, it ensures that some, or many, of the potential prey will escape predation and reproduce. The ability to predict mass emergence of disease vectors increases the efficacy of control measures, whether by sterile males, toxic baits, or conventional pesticides. Using two northern and two southern populations of the pitcher-plant mosquito, Wyeomyia smithii, I determined the degree of synchronization of development by using realistic, fluctuating temperatures simulating a temperate spring environment. I found that hibernating individuals that started development at warmer temperatures later in the spring developed faster than individuals that started development at cooler temperatures earlier in the spring, both in northern and southern populations. This difference led to later developing mosquitoes “catching up” to those that started development earlier. We call this passive synchronizing effect of warming environments “autosynchronization.” The autosychonization effect was apparent within both southern and northern populations.
These results demonstrate the autosychronization effect, but this effect was not able to synchronize the developmentally conservative northern populations with the more developmentally progressive southern populations, even when encountering the same warming spring environment. The efficient timing of mosquito control efforts will be highly applicable within climatic zones but not between climatic zones due to differences in the developmental physiology of target organisms.