Love Is in the Air

You know that cute musician boy who you always secretly hoped would serenade you and ask you out on a date? Well, maybe I was just having a very high school crush, but the serenade (and the date) never happened. So long, love life. I don’t think it had anything to do with the fact that I never talked to him. Nope. Communication? Nah. Not that important.

Well. Maybe I should work on that.

As it turns out, communication is a pretty important factor in building relationships. Take a lesson from any mosquito. While they definitely can’t talk, they emit tones from their wing beat frequencies that match up with mosquitoes of the opposite sex in their same species.

A 2009 study discovered that male Aedes aegypti mosquitoes are able to hear noises 1200 Hz. Before you question why this news is important at all (and to find out what 1200 Hz sounds like), click here and go to 4:56. Turns out that annoying buzz you hear when a mosquito flies in your ear can be its mating call.

How do mosquitoes hear in the first place? They have an organ called the Johnston’s organ located in the second antennae segment (nearest the head). It’s a mass of sensory cells that can detect wind and gravity and also a prospective mate’s wing beat frequency.

This is particularly helpful in male mosquitoes, which may be identified by their feathery antennae. The antennae are only tuned to the frequency at which females of their species emit sound, and the discovery that the males could hear frequencies of 1200 Hz is 400 Hz above what researchers previously thought was the male’s deafness threshold.

The other (and more applicable) part of the study found that female mosquitoes who have not mated yet are more likely to respond to the male frequency (1400 Hz) than are already mated females, suggesting that mating makes a female less sensitivity to male stimuli.

Basically, once a female mosquito is off the market, she’s off the market. No cheating involved (or at least very rarely).

This could have implications in studies about disease control and could affect sterile male releases of mosquitoes. It would be important to make sure the altered males will be able to attract mates, or else the release of extra mosquitoes would not produce the desired decrease in the wild mosquito population. And if the sterile males are able to mate with a female, she will be less likely to mate a second time with a (possibly) fertile male.

I wish I knew what prompted the researchers to do this study. I really do. I guess love is in the air.

Photo credits: www.news.sciencemag.org, www.sciencephoto.com