PT  - JOURNAL ARTICLE
AU  - Lionel Feugère
AU  - Gabriella Gibson
AU  - Nicholas C. Manoukis
AU  - Olivier Roux
TI  - Mosquito ‘mate-seeking’ at long-range: are male swarms loud enough to be located by females?
AID  - 10.1101/2020.09.01.277202
DP  - 2020 Jan 01
TA  - bioRxiv
PG  - 2020.09.01.277202
4099  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2020/09/01/2020.09.01.277202.short
4100  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2020/09/01/2020.09.01.277202.full
AB  - The high-pitched whine of mosquitoes in flight is produced by their wingbeats, and is heard by conspecifics, who have unsurpassed sound sensitivity among arthropods. We investigated whether female mosquitoes might use the sound of a mating swarm at long-range (several meters) to identify species-specific cues. In the laboratory we exposed free-flying An. coluzzii females to pre-recorded male An. coluzzii and An. gambiae s.s. swarms to assess female response to male flight sounds over a range of ecologically-relevant sound-levels, based on our reference recording (70-male swarm producing 20 dB SPL 0.9m away). Sound-levels tested were related to equivalent distances between the female and the male swarm for a given number of males, enabling us to infer distances over which females can hear large male swarms. Females did not respond to swarm sounds at 36±3 dB, but their flight speed increased significantly at 48±3 dB, equivalent to a distance of 0.6±0.2 m from a point-source swarm-sound produced by 1,000 males. However, this distance is less than the 1,000-male swarm radius. We show that even for the loudest swarms of 10,000 males, a female will hear an individual male at the edge of the swarm sooner or more loudly than the swarm as a whole, due to the exponential increase of sound at close-range. Therefore, females highly unlikely cannot use swarm sound to locate swarms at long-range. We conclude that mosquito acoustic communication is restricted to close-range dyad interactions.Competing Interest StatementThe authors have declared no competing interest.