Mosquito Sprays Can Reduce West Nile Virus Risk, Even If Population Numbers Don’t Drop
In a new study on truck-mounted mosquito-control sprays, the proportion of local mosquito populations that could potentially carry West Nile virus decreased after treatments, even though overall numbers of mosquitoes weren't affected—an "invisible" but positive sign about the utility of such mosquito management efforts.
New Study Improves Sterile Insect Technique for Mosquitoes
Researchers in Florida find that male Aedes aegypti mosquitoes live longer when irradiated as adults rather than pupae, an important advance in protocols for deploying the sterile insect technique to manage wild populations of disease-transmitting mosquitoes.
Mosquito Populations Linked Across Further Distances Than the Viruses They Carry
In an analysis of mosquito sampling across 20 years in Connecticut, mosquito populations were often correlated at sites 10 kilometers apart and sometimes as far as 40 kilometers apart. But the same data showed the presence of mosquito-borne viruses rarely correlated across distances more than 5 kilometers, complicating potential approaches to managing mosquitoes and the risk of vector-borne disease.
New Study Pegs Yellow Fever Mosquito’s Average Flight Range at 106 Meters
A new meta-analysis indicates that the yellow fever mosquito (Aedes aegypti) travels an average distance of 106 meters in mark-release-recapture studies, a figure that could play an important role in mosquito-management efforts.