Less mosquitoes can bring more illnesses!

Australian researchers have discovered something remarkable: If fewer mosquitoes, they will get bigger, disease will appear more. They said this is very important for us to deal with mosquito diseases such as 'Ross River fever'.

Less mosquitoes can make them bigger and diseases appear more. (Photo: Internet).

Sibohan de Little , a graduate student at the University of Adelaide (Australia), presented a doctoral thesis with a remarkable discovery at the International Ecology Conference in Brisbane.

In the first part of the study, de Little investigated the development of Aedes vigilax populations, under the guidance of Associate Professor Corey Bradshaw.

In a very extensive field experiment in Darwin, she found that the ' population density ' of mosquitoes in a region affects their size. Her conclusion is that when the mosquito density is high, their size is much smaller than when they are low density and vice versa.

Specifically, if the density is reduced from 50 to 5 larvae (larvae larvae) in 1 m2, the size of the adult female mosquito will increase to 8%. Female mosquitoes will increase in size because their lifespan is longer than 48% and they produce some 67% more eggs than normal sized mosquitoes.

De Little thinks that the smaller the mosquito, the bigger they are because the larvae do not have to compete for food and because of the full nutrition they grow up when they grow up (turn into mosquitoes). She said: 'The bigger the mosquitoes are, the longer they live, the more likely they are to fly, the more blood they can gain and the wider the vector of transmission '.

Current mosquito killing program

De Little said that mosquito control programs are now aimed at reducing populations of mosquito larvae, developing after spring or spring tides. She said: " It seems that it is considered the easiest way to evaluate the effectiveness of the program and this assessment is not true ." And she reminded the government to pay more attention to the density phenomenon. The larvae are low, a phenomenon that causes mosquitoes to harm not only to diminish but to increase.

The problem becomes worse

De Little said that if only reducing the population of mosquitoes, then it would be half-way, enabling the remaining mosquitoes to " live better ". ' If we don't kill 100%, the survivors will have a wider and faster disease vector .'

She commented: 'It is very difficult to kill all mosquito larvae so there must be a plan to kill larvae from the very early stages. If you kill the late larvae, when they almost reach the maximum size, it is invisible, we have created the more dangerous 'super mosquitoes' and the effectiveness of the mosquito killing program is very low, can even be said is not successful '.