Citizen power mobilized to fight against mosquito borne diseases
Citizen scientists use phone apps to work in collaboration with researchers to collect huge amounts of data on disease carrying mosquitoes as part of a WHO-supported series on vector-borne diseases
Peer-Reviewed PublicationIMAGE: YELLOW FEVER MOSQUITO HAVING A BLOOD-MEAL. view more
CREDIT: AUTHOR: JAMES GATHANY SOURCE CDC - PHIL
The latest from Mosquito Alert, a citizen science system for investigating and managing disease-carrying mosquitoes, has collected and released 13,700 new database records on the presence, location, and spread of these mosquitos. These data, hosted in the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF), are part of an ongoing world-wide collaboration between citizen volunteers, who use a specifically designed app to photograph mosquitos and report bites and locations of potential breeding sites, and entomological experts, who validate the findings to determine if the collected information provides evidence of the presence of any of the mosquito species of top concern. This study is part of a WHO-sponsored series on vector borne human diseases, which collects and presents biodiversity data for a range of different disease vectors and promotes data sharing to increase the speed at which researchers can assess and address human health threats. In this particular study, an entire community of citizen scientists have been actively engaged in furthering the acquisition of information in a cost-effective, as well as publicly educational, manner. In addition to providing a large, widespread, valuable resource for studying and containing infectious diseases, this work serves as an excellent model for bringing together the mobilizing power of citizens and scientists to address important health issues. This study has been published in the open-access, open-data journal GigaByte.
Vector-borne diseases account for more than 17% of all human infectious diseases, with mosquito-borne diseases causing the greatest health burden on society based on case numbers, deaths, and resultant disabilities. While there has been significant progress in the fight against malaria, this progress is currently slowing. Whereas, progress on combating other mosquito-driven diseases, such as dengue, chikungunya, yellow fever, and Zika, are expanding, due to the increasing number of cases and fatalities for these diseases. To best combat these health risks, researchers must fill the large gaps in knowledge related to the presence, spread, and activity of mosquitos that spread these diseases, Data mobilization campaigns serve as one of the best means to improve geographical data coverage. Harnessing the collective power of citizen scientists across the globe has served the scientific community well with regard to being able to collect massive amounts of information across the globe, especially in the areas of biology, conservation, and ecology. It is currently a major weapon in the fight against mosquito-borne diseases.
The work presented in the article was carried out by Mosquito Alert, which provided the first detection of the Asian bush mosquito Aedes japonicus in Spain in 2018. This finding was a striking observation as it was an isolated population of mosquitos that were located 1,300 km from its previously nearest known location in Europe. Since this species was not expected to appear in this region, it had not been targeted by any local surveillance program. This served as clear indication of the danger of monitoring specific species in areas that were primarily in and close to regions they were known to exist. However, budget and manpower limitations, make it nearly impossible to collect data across expansive ranges. Mosquito Alert, by harnessing a largely free resource of manpower, were able to extend their work to identify and track other invasive mosquitoes across a much larger geographical range. They armed a cadre of citizen scientists with a phone app aimed at collecting usable types of data and developing a harmonized methodology for collecting and validating these data by experts. The information collected in the apps are updated on a daily basis, and thus, provide near real-time information on the status of deadly disease-carrying mosquitos.
This form of combined data collection strategies provides an incredible addition to governmental vector screening programs, which require huge resources to fill all geographical corners of their countries. Since citizens with mobile devices are everywhere, the potential to use this approach as an early warning system of invasive species of all types can move from city-scale to continental scale, and, with continued growth, global scale.
Of this huge potential, first author Dr Živko Južnič-Zonta says: “Because of its daily update, this dataset could help to optimize vector control, as citizen scientists provide information about nuisance and presence of mosquitoes at almost real time.”
The availability of such a large public collection of validated mosquito images not only allows researchers themselves to work directly with these data, this enormous dataset can also be used to train machine-learning models for vector detection and classification, further increasing the power of these data to serve as part of an arsenal to improve global human health.
The value of such data collected by an army of citizen scientists in concert with experts also shows the need for developing a new publication credit system to evaluate contributions from multiple and diverse collaborators, which, for this study, included university researchers, entomologists, and other non-academics such as independent researchers and citizen scientists. For this article, the authors carefully considered and designed such a credit system. As research that makes use of citizens as a major, and free, component of research programs continues to grow, the credit system used in this article sets forth a process to allow such large consortium to provide clear credit to the entire cadre of individuals involved in any study, which is long past due.
This work is part of a series of articles that assess the range and diversity of a wide variety of vector-borne diseases. GigaScience Press has partnered with GBIF, which has been supported by TDR, the Special Programme for Research and Training in Tropical Diseases, hosted at the World Health Organization. Through this, GBIF are releasing the first 11 Data Release papers on vectors of human disease in a thematic series in the journal GigaByte. To better incentivize the sharing of these extremely important datasets, the article processing charges to authors have been waived for these easy-to-write descriptions that are associated with public domain datasets in the GBIF database to assist with the global call for novel data. This effort has led to the release of newly digitized location data for over 600,000 vector specimens observed across the Americas and Europe.
GigaByte’s novel, end-to-end XML publishing platform, means publication can be done in a quicker and more interactive manner than traditional scientific publications. Papers in this biodiversity series include interactive maps, embedded protocols, and multilingual options for several of these articles, allowing Portuguese and Spanish speakers to better comprehend the implications of important work relating to the public health of their communities.
Further Reading
Južnič-Zonta Ž, et al. Mosquito alert: leveraging citizen science to create a GBIF mosquito occurrence dataset. GigaByte 2022. doi: 10.46471/gigabyte.54
Mosquito Alert website: http://www.mosquitoalert.com/en/project/what-is-mosquito-alert
Mosquito Alert App: http://www.mosquitoalert.com/en/project/envia-datos
Mosquito Alert website: http://www.mosquitoalert.com/en/project/what-is-mosquito-alert
Mosquito Alert App: http://www.mosquitoalert.com/en/project/envia-datos
Read more, see the GigaScience Blog at: http://gigasciencejournal.com/blog/publishing-mosquito-alert-data
To see all of the articles in this WHO-sponsored vector-borne disease series go to: https://doi.org/10.46471/GIGABYTE_SERIES_0002
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About GigaScience Press
GigaScience Press is BGI's Open Access Publishing division, which publishes scientific journals and data. Its publishing projects are carried out with international publishing partners and infrastructure providers, including Oxford University Press and River Valley Technologies. It currently publishes two data-centric journals: its premier journal GigaScience (launched 2012) and its new journal GigaByte (launched 2020). It also publishes data, software, and other research objects via its GigaDB.org database. To encourage transparent reporting of scientific research as well as enable future access and analyses, it is a requirement of manuscript submission to all GigaScience Press journals that all supporting data and source code be made available in GigaDB or in a community approved, publicly available repository. See GigaSciencePress.com
JOURNAL
Gigabyte
METHOD OF RESEARCH
Observational study
SUBJECT OF RESEARCH
Not applicable
ARTICLE TITLE
Mosqu
Tired mosquitoes would rather catch up on sleep than bite you
By understanding the mosquitoes’ circadian rhythms, researchers hope to find better ways to prevent infection.
Peer-Reviewed PublicationIMAGE: UC BIOLOGISTS DISCOVERED THAT OVERTIRED MOSQUITOES CHOOSE TO CATCH UP ON SLEEP RATHER THAN SEEK A BLOOD MEAL. view more
CREDIT: ANDREW HIGLEY/UC CREATIVE
Turns out you’re not the only one who needs a good night's rest to function well the next day.
Researchers with the University of Cincinnati found that mosquitoes whose slumber is disrupted are more interested in catching up on their sleep than looking for food the next day. The research demonstrates how vital this biological function is even among insects.
“It was a bit surprising. Sleep deprived or not, a blood meal should appeal to them,” UC doctoral student and study lead author Oluwaseun Ajayi said.
The study was published online on May 3 and in print on June 1 in the Journal of Experimental Biology.
The phenomenon of catching up on missed sleep, called sleep rebound, has been observed in other animals such as honeybees, fruit flies and people.
Biologists in UC’s College of Arts and Sciences and Virginia Tech’s Department of Biochemistry spent more than a year developing protocols to study mosquito sleep. While observations can affect the outcome of virtually any experiment — a phenomenon called the observer effect — UC biologist Joshua Benoit said this was especially true when studying mosquito sleep.
Mosquitoes are able to sense people through their body heat, odors, movement, vibrations and the carbon dioxide they exhale from their lungs and emit from their skin.
“It’s really hard to quantify sleep in mosquitoes when, as soon as you walk in the room, you’re considered their Thanksgiving dinner,” Benoit said.
So researchers set up the experiment in a quiet part of Crosley Tower on UC’s Uptown campus, where the mosquitoes were separated from passersby by multiple rooms within rooms. Researchers set up cameras and infrared sensors that could record when the mosquitoes were moving without disturbing them.
Mosquitoes in the lab sleep a lot — between 16 and 19 hours a day depending on the species and the stimulation around them.
Recognizing a sleeping mosquito takes some skill. When they’re not looking for food, mosquitoes perch for long periods of time to conserve energy. But researchers discovered a subtle telltale sign the mosquitoes were asleep.
“When mosquitoes enter a sleep-like state, their hind legs droop and their body comes closer to the surface,” Ajayi said.
Virginia Tech researcher and study co-author Clément Vinauger used video observations to document this behavior in several mosquito species.
The experiment examined three species of mosquitoes, each responsible for transmitting disease to people: Aedes aegypti, a “day biter,” Culex pipiens, which seeks a meal at dusk; and Anopheles stephensi, which is most active at night.
Researchers studied the mosquitoes’ sleep and feeding behavior for about a week after they were acclimatized to their new experimental habitat. In a second experiment, researchers subjected them to sleep deprivation during their normal bedtime by vibrating their enclosures at regular intervals during the day or night.
While more than 75% of mosquitoes that were not subjected to sleep deprivation sought a blood meal, less than one-quarter of them had any interest in food after a sleepless night. This represented a 54% decrease in the propensity to feed among sleep-deprived mosquitoes.
“What’s surprising to me is that as much as mosquitoes need blood to produce eggs, they will give it up to recover the sleep they lost,” Benoit said. “They might not be aroused as much because of the need to catch up on sleep.”
The overtired mosquitoes also were less likely to land on a host in both laboratory and field settings, suggesting that the same behaviors would occur in natural settings like your back yard.
Lucas Gleitz participated in the research project as a UC undergraduate biology student. After graduation this year, he plans to attend medical school.
The study’s findings were relatable given the sleepless nights most college students endure.
“As a college student, we joke that we eat sleep for dinner,” Gleitz said.
Sleep is tied to immune and restorative functions such as tissue repair and protein synthesis, Gleitz said. Research has also demonstrated how important sleep is to memory and brain function.
“We learned that sleep is a very crucial aspect of living organisms. Those internal clocks keep running, even for mosquitoes,” he said.
Mosquitoes cause more human suffering than any other animal, according to the World Health Organization. Malaria alone kills more than 400,000 people annually. And mosquitoes carry pathogens for other deadly diseases such as dengue and yellow fever.
By understanding the mosquitoes’ circadian rhythms, researchers hope to find better ways to prevent infection.
“It’s important to understand their sleep dynamics — when they feed and when they sleep,” Benoit said.
JOURNAL
Journal of Experimental Biology
METHOD OF RESEARCH
Experimental study
SUBJECT OF RESEARCH
Animals
ARTICLE TITLE
Behavioral and postural analyses establish sleep-like states for mosquitoes that can impact host landing and blood feedingito alert: leveraging citizen science to create a GBIF mosquito occurrence dataset
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