Mosquitoes are a leading vector for harmful diseases, creating the need for novel control methods. Wanting to develop a mosquito repellent to curtail mosquito-borne illnesses, I set out to test what stimulus causes aversion and if the stimulus can be artificially replicated and delivered.

Since the entire female mosquito brain has already been mapped, I initially wanted to use in vivo two-photon calcium microscopy to image the female mosquito brain while it is exposed to a source of danger. I wanted to determine what senses it used to sense the danger and how to artificially stimulate the observed response. Unable to gain access to this imaging technique, I switched my experimental procedure to observing the response of a mosquito to a dragonfly and playing the frequency of a dragonfly’s wingbeat to a mosquito. Given that we know that mosquitoes find their mates through the frequency of mosquito wingbeats, I hypothesized that mosquitoes might be repelled by the frequency of the wingbeats of dragonflies, their natural predator. I filed a provisional patent application (63/008,079) in 2020, followed by an international patent application (PCT/US21/26649) in 2021 for this hypothesis.

To test my hypothesis, I created a field station in my backyard, since I wasn’t allowed to conduct research on potential vectors for disease at my high school. To ensure proper containment, I also set up a field station in a fully zipper enclosed grow tent, in which I reared mosquitoes on home-made sucrose solution in specialized mosquito nets. I also constructed a custom dragonfly cage with window mesh as the side, plywood for the base, and an acrylic hinging roof on the top. To ensure quality recordings without background noise, I set up sound dampeners in the containment tent for my experiment. To analyze dragonfly recordings, I learned how to conduct spectral analysis on Origin using the Fast Fourier Transform algorithm.

My results were inconclusive, since the dragonfly did not respond to the presence of the mosquito, and the dragonfly had no observable effect on the mosquito. I believe the dragonfly’s lack of response could be caused by the high temperatures in the containment tent and a lack of food. My next step is to investigate how mosquitoes convert their perception of mechanical shock into active aversion from an associated odor, as a recent study by Clément Vinauger et al. suggested.