Hitting the right note at the right time: Circadian control of audibility in Anopheles mosquito mating swarms is mediated by flight tones

Autor: Jason Somers, Marcos Georgiades, Matthew P. Su, Judit Bagi, Marta Andrés, Alexandros Alampounti, Gordon Mills, Watson Ntabaliba, Sarah J. Moore, Roberta Spaccapelo, Joerg T. Albert
Jazyk: angličtina
Rok vydání: 2022
Předmět:
Zdroj: Science Advances
ISSN: 2375-2548
Popis: Description
By beating their wings faster around sunset, male Anopheles mosquitoes sensitize their auditory system to female flight tones.
Mating swarms of malaria mosquitoes form every day at sunset throughout the tropical world. They typically last less than 30 minutes. Activity must thus be highly synchronized between the sexes. Moreover, males must identify the few sporadically entering females by detecting the females’ faint flight tones. We show that the Anopheles circadian clock not only ensures a tight synchrony of male and female activity but also helps sharpen the males’ acoustic detection system: By raising their flight tones to 1.5 times the female flight tone, males enhance the audibility of females, specifically at swarm time. Previously reported “harmonic convergence” events are only a random by-product of the mosquitoes’ flight tone variance and not a signature of acoustic interaction between males and females. The flight tones of individual mosquitoes occupy narrow, partly non-overlapping frequency ranges, suggesting that the audibility of individual females varies across males.
Databáze: OpenAIRE