Mosquitoes use their own kind of eHarmony to find a compatible mate. New research shows that male and female mosquitoes sing duets of matching love songs by vibrating their wings. The annoying recordings of mosquito duets aren’t likely to go platinum, but they give researchers some interesting new ways to think about courtship behavior in insects.
The study, published online January 8 in Science, finds that male and female Aedes aegypti — carriers of dengue and yellow fever — change the pitch of their buzzing to match each other’s harmonics. The results go “way beyond the accepted dogma on hearing in mosquitoes and perhaps indeed in other organisms,” comments Daniel Robert, an expert on insect hearing at the University of Bristol in England.
A female mosquito’s come-hither buzz, produced by vibrating her wings at a certain rate, is irresistible to males. Scientists have long thought that male mosquitoes could hear just enough sound to locate and home in on a female, says coauthor of the new study Ronald Hoy, of Cornell University.