Mosquito Antenna Model
5 videos • 68 views • by Musical Acoustics Our model of the mosquito antenna mimicks how mosquitoes hear their environment. Mosquitoes are amazingly good at recognizing the presence, species and sex of other mosquitoes by analyzing their flight tones. Mosquitoes mostly communicate by means of sound rather than by means of vision. Their auditory nerves are tuned to frequencies below 500 Hz, and passive mosquitoes cannot hear higher frequencies directly. Motionless mosquitoes CANNOT hear higher frequencies at all. However, flying mosquitoes CAN. When they fly themselves, their own flight tone interferes with the incoming flight tone of another mosquito. Some unknown nonlinear processes create distortion proucts, i.e., combination tones, like sum tones and difference tones. The difference tones lie well within the audible frequency range of mosquitoes. It is hypothesizes acoustic mosquito communication exclusively based on nonlinear distortion products. Our model of the mosquito antenna mimicks the motions of the mosquito antenna to shed light on the nonlinear processes that enable mosquito mating and communication. When feeding the model with mosquito sounds, the model barely responds. However, when feedingit with two mosquito sounds, the model output shows the expected difference tones that lie well within the audible frequency region of mosquitoes. The model deepens our understaning of mosquito behavior. The model could serve as a biologically-inspired pre-processor of mosquito recordings, improving the identification of mosquito presence, species, and sex. Such processing can improve the performance and reliability of automatic classifiers. Females of some mosquito species are vectors of diseases, like malaria, dengie fever and yellow fever. Large-scale automatic identification of mosquito species and sex is important for surveillance: identification of breeding hot-spots of dangerous species can protect the residents by a) warning them, b) targeted pesticide spraying. Small-scale automatic identification of mosquito species and sex can save the individual, when installed at home by a) warning the resident if a dangerous, female mosquito is detected and b) attracting dangerous female mosquitoes into a trap or c) chasing dangerous females off. Eventually, a plausible mosquito antenna model can save lives.