Mosquitoes are a major annoyance in the D.C. region, but massively deadly in other parts of the world. And the only thing they like more than breeding is biting you.
Researchers in Maryland may have figured out a way that turns their affinity for breeding against them — leaving them disinterested in you until they die off days later.
Entomologists at the University of Maryland traveled to West Africa to test their theory out. They took venom from spiders and scorpions and mixed it with fungus native to that region. Each spore of that supercharged fungus, which is microscopic in size, meant death to mosquitoes. And even better, “Doesn’t hurt people,” said Raymond St. Leger, a professor at the University of Maryland who led the study.
“We used male mosquitoes to disseminate the fungus,” he said. “We can just let male mosquitoes walk on the fungus, then they carried out and they find the females.”
It’s the females that like to find your ankles, arms and everywhere else. But when male mosquitoes mate with them, they pass on the nerve toxin added to the fungus, turning it into a deadly, sexually transmitted disease.
“They no longer recognize us, they no longer feed from us, so they no longer transmit disease,” St. Leger said.
That’s the important part because while mosquitoes are merely annoying in the area, they’re deadly in other parts of the world. Millions of people die from mosquito-borne illnesses, such as malaria in parts of Africa and Asia. St. Leger said those problems are slowly making their way to the U.S.
“It’s coming our way,” St. Leger said. “Almost everything we’ve done with the world has benefited mosquitoes. So global warming, we’ve got a lot of mosquitoes which couldn’t live in America before, which can live in America now.”
Noting malaria outbreaks in places, such as Texas and Florida, he’s worried mosquitoes will cause more problems in America over the next 10 to 20 years.
His method of attaching the venoms to the fungus is very cheap to produce, and produces fast. But the mosquitoes you need to worry about here are different from the ones that spread illness in Africa and Asia. And the fungus used to pass along the venoms are native to those lands too, and might not have much of an impact here.
“We don’t know these African fungi would work well in America — a different setting,” he said. “So it’s not necessarily a one-size-fits-all.”
In the meantime, he’s also working on other ways to attract more mosquitoes to pass along the fungi beyond breeding. The team is also working to make the fungi smell like flowers, which the little critters love. But his concern is that the right support won’t be there to test similar methods in the U.S.
St. Leger said shake-ups in places, such as the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Agriculture and National Institutes of Health, have made it harder to not just get funding, but also approval for testing to see if what’s working overseas will also protect Americans.
“The trick is though, to get ready now, because the mosquitoes are coming, the diseases are coming,” St. Leger warned. “These mosquitoes, they’re very different from each other. They carry different diseases. Yet they’re all doing very well right now, and many of them are likely to do very well in America with their diseases.”
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