Experiments and Analysis of Mosquito Flight Behaviors in a Wind Tunnel: An Introduction

Diego Alonso San Alberto; Claire Rusch; Jeffrey A Riffell

doi:10.1101/pdb.top107674

Experiments and Analysis of Mosquito Flight Behaviors in a Wind Tunnel: An Introduction

Cold Spring Harb Protoc. 2023 May 3. doi: 10.1101/pdb.top107674. Online ahead of print.

Authors

Diego Alonso San Alberto¹, Claire Rusch¹, Jeffrey A Riffell²

Affiliations

¹ Department of Biology, University of Washington, Seattle, Washington 98195, USA.
² Department of Biology, University of Washington, Seattle, Washington 98195, USA jriffell@uw.edu.

PMID: 37137567
DOI: 10.1101/pdb.top107674

Abstract

Mosquitoes detect and navigate to important resources, like a host, using combinations of different sensory stimuli. The relative importance of the sensory cues can change as the mosquito gets closer to their target. Other factors, both internal and external, can also influence the mosquito behavior. A mechanistic understanding of these sensory stimuli, and how they impact mosquito navigation, can now be readily studied using wind tunnels and associated computer vision systems. In this introduction, we present a behavioral paradigm using a wind tunnel for flight behavior analysis. The wind tunnel's large size with its associated cameras and software system for analysis of the mosquito flight tracks can be sophisticated and sometimes cost-prohibitive. Nevertheless, the wind tunnel's flexibility in allowing the testing of multimodal stimuli and scaling of environmental stimuli makes it possible to reproduce conditions from the field and test them in the laboratory, while also allowing the observation of natural flight kinematics.