A female mosquito mates once in her life. On the outcome of this single, poorly understood encounter hangs her lifetime fertility, and thus the size of the mosquito population; a key factor in the capacity of these insects to transmit life-threatening diseases such as malaria and dengue fever. It will also decide the success or failure of eagerly anticipated vector control strategies such as gene drive and sterile insect technique (SIT) which depend entirely on the ability of genetically-modified males to mate with wild-type females. One of the few things we know about mosquito sex is that for most medically important mosquito species it takes place in the context of male swarms; complex, apparently disordered, groupings of hundreds or thousands of individual males that form at dusk and in to which a female enters solely to mate. What happens once she enters the swarm is essentially unknown.
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How do males maintain a swarm? How does the swarm react to the presence of a female? Do females choose their mate? If so, what do females look for in a male? How do mosquitoes recognise and mate only with their own species even in the context of mixed swarms containing different species? These all remain open questions yet the answers are critical not only to better understand the mating biology of the most important vectors of malaria but to the safe and effective roll-out of potentially game-changing new strategies for vector control like gene drive.
