Landing mosquitoes bounce when engaging a substrate

Abstract

In this experimental study we film the landings of Aedes aegypti mosquitoes to characterize landing behaviors and kinetics, limitations, and the passive physiological mechanics they employ to land on a vertical surface. A typical landing involves 1–2 bounces, reducing inbound momentum by more than half before the mosquito firmly attaches to a surface. Mosquitoes initially approach landing surfaces at 0.1–0.6 m/s, decelerating to zero velocity in approximately 5 ms at accelerations as high as 5.5 gravities. Unlike Dipteran relatives, mosquitoes do not visibly prepare for landing with leg adjustments or body pitching. Instead mosquitoes rely on damping by deforming two forelimbs and buckling of the proboscis, which also serves to distribute the impact force, lessening the potential of detection by a mammalian host. The rebound response of a landing mosquito is well-characterized by a passive mass-spring-damper model which permits the calculation of force across impact velocity. The landing force of the average mosquito in our study is approximately 40 $$\upmu$$ μ N corresponding to an impact velocity of 0.24 m/s. The substrate contact velocity which produces a force perceptible to humans, 0.42 m/s, is above 85% of experimentally observed landing speeds.

Auditory sensory range of male mosquitoes for the detection of female flight sound

“…They start to accelerate at around 100–120 mm from the sound source in spite of the difference in the sound level. When landing on a wall, male mosquitoes have been reported not to prepare for landing but to absorb the impact with their proboscis and front legs [ 39 ], yet in the phonotactic flight observed in this study, the mosquitoes decelerated as they approached the sound source. Similar behaviours have been observed in parasitic flies that perform phonotactic flights in response to the pressure component of acoustic cues in search of hosts.…”

Visual and thermal stimuli modulate mosquito-host contact with implications for improving malaria vector control tools

“…aegypti land nearly ten times more on a vertical, purple unheated target compared to the same target positioned horizontally. 49 The remarkable discrepancies in the results reported on this topic highlight the need to further investigate the effect of the spatial orientation on landing behavior across the Culicidae.…”