Search

Where a female mosquito lays her eggs creates the conditions for reproductive success. Here we identify a communal behavior among ovipositing female mosquitoes. When choosing equal breeding sites, gravid Aedes aegypti aggregate more often than expected. This aggregation occurs when water contact is restricted and does not require the presence of eggs. Instead, the aggregation is regulated by the number of females present at the breeding site. Using assays with both occupied and empty oviposition sites, we show that the Orco olfactory co-receptor and a carbon dioxide receptor, Gr3, detect the presence of mosquitoes. orco mutants aggregate more often in empty sites, suggesting attractive olfactory cues influence females to associate with one another. Gr3 mutant females do not prefer either site, suggesting that the CO 2 receptor is necessary to evaluate mosquito population density at breeding sites. Further, raising CO 2 levels is sufficient to cause wild-type mosquitoes to avoid empty oviposition sites. Our results demonstrate that female mosquitoes can regulate their own population density at breeding sites using attractive and repellent communal cues., (© 2024. The Author(s).)

This is the first pilot study on alternative conceptions and obstacles pertaining to pneumonia in adolescents of different school vulnerability indexes. Countries with low socioeconomic levels are disproportionately affected, with Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) being the second-most affected area in the world, after sub-Saharan Africa. In spite of this fact, pneumonia is not included as an important component within the contents of the microbiology curriculum unit in the natural science school program. Therefore, we wanted to study how students knew about this topic by putting One Health into action by building and validating qualitative and quantitative questionnaires, put together by different experts in pedagogy, didactics, microbiology, and veterinary to find out what students knew about pneumonia and their misconceptions about it. A total of 148 students (in 8th and 9th grade) participated in this survey. The results reveal that no statistically significant differences between the different scholar grades ( p = 0.3360 Pearson chi ∧ 2) or genders ( p = 0.8000 Fisher's exact test) presented higher or lower School Vulnerability Index (SVI). Regardless of the social stratum or the level of vulnerability of the students, they have heard about this disease primarily through their family/relatives, maintaining a superficial notion of the disease, learning wrong ideas about microorganisms and treatments that can contribute to the risk to public health., Competing Interests: The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest. The handling editor is currently organizing a Research Topic with one of the authors DF., (Copyright © 2021 Marchant, Sánchez, Duprat, Mena, Sjöberg-Herrera, Cabal and Figueroa.)