Love song of the dengue vector mosquito

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