Business · Wired
Flight Path Data Catches How Mosquitoes Target Humans
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Infectious diseases borne by mosquitoes—such as malaria, dengue fever, and Zika fever—claim more than 770,000 lives worldwide each year.
Key facts
- The data obtained from a total of 20 experiments exceeds 53 million points, with more than 400,000 flight paths recorded
- Mosquitoes that entered within a radius of about 40 centimeters of the carbon dioxide source suddenly slowed to 0.2 m/s and began flying erratically, swaying without a clear direction
- Infectious diseases borne by mosquitoes—such as malaria, dengue fever, and Zika fever—claim more than 770,000 lives worldwide each year
- One was the active state, in which they actively explored the space while maintaining a speed of approximately 0.7 meter per second
Summary
In this context, a research team led by the Georgia Institute of Technology and Massachusetts Institute of Technology has succeeded in automatically deriving a dynamic model governing mosquito flight by applying Bayesian inference statistical methods to a vast amount of data recording mosquito movements. Bayesian inference is a statistical technique that probabilistically determines the most plausible model parameters from observed data. “The big question was, how do mosquitoes find a human target?” explains Cheng-Yi Fei, a postdoctoral researcher at MIT. The research team released two female Aedes aegypti mosquitoes into a sealed experimental space and recorded their flight paths in 0.01-second increments using two infrared cameras.