Evolutionary lability of odour‐mediated host preference by the malaria vector <i>Anopheles gambiae</i>
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Many species of disease-vector mosquitoes display vertebrate host specificity. Despite considerable progress in recent years in understanding the proximate and ultimate factors related to non-random host selection at the interspecific level, the basis of this selection remains only partially understood. Anopheles gambiae sensu stricto, the main malaria vector in Africa, is considered a highly anthropophilic mosquito, and host odours have been shown to play a major role in the host-seeking process of this species. Studies on host preference of An. gambiae have been either conducted in controlled conditions using laboratory reared mosquitoes and worn stockings as host-related stimuli, or have been done in the field with methods that do not account for internal (e.g. age of sampled mosquitoes) and/or environmental effects. We explored differential behavioural responses to host odours between two populations of the same sibling species, An. gambiae in semi-field conditions in Burkina Faso. The behavioural responses (i.e. degree of activation and strength of anemotaxis) were investigated using a Y-olfactometer designed to accommodate whole hosts as a source of odour stimuli. Two strains of An. gambiae (3 to 4-day-old female) from laboratory Kisumu strain, and from field-collected individuals were confronted to combinations of stimuli comprising calf odour, human odour and outdoor air. In dual-choice tests, field mosquitoes chose human odour over calf odour, outdoor air over calf odour and responded equally to human and outdoor air, while laboratory mosquitoes responded equally to human and calf odour, human odour over outdoor air and calf odour over outdoor air. Overall, no effect of CO(2) exhaled by humans and calves neither on the proportion of activated mosquitoes nor on the relative attractiveness to odour stimuli was found. We report for the first time an intraspecific variation in host-odour responses. This study clearly suggests that there may be genetic polymorphism underlying host preference and emphasizes that the highly anthropophilic label given to An. gambiae s.s. must be carefully interpreted and refer to populations rather than the whole sibling species.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".