Skip to main content
Fig. 4 | Parasites & Vectors

Fig. 4

From: Targeting male mosquito mating behaviour for malaria control

Fig. 4

The success of mosquito releases depends heavily on the mating performance of released individuals: (a) ideally, the distribution of the mating phenotype of release individuals (white curve) exactly matches that of the target population (black curve) and repeated releases (time t1, t2, t3…) achieve population suppression. In (b) and (c) three sympatric sub-taxa of An. gambiae (red, blue and green) are characterized by distinct distributions (seen from above) in a hypothetical two-dimensional mating phenotype space (traits 1 & 2). In (b) the phenotypic distribution of the release strain (black) is narrower than that of population 1 it originates from, effectively decreasing the effective ratio of mating with wild individuals from population 1, there is no mating with other populations. In (c) environmental effects on the development of adult mating behaviour prevent mate discrimination in released individuals (grey shade) and mating occurs at low rates with any of the cryptic taxa present in the area

Back to article page