Researchers at Virginia Commonwealth University found that when temperatures rise, mosquito populations may become more abundant due to predators’ inability to control them.
The study “Warming and Top-Down Control of Stage-Structured Prey: Linking Theory to Patterns in Natural Systems” was featured on the cover of Ecology, a journal published by the Ecological Society of America. It discovered that rising temperatures, which are frequently associated with climate change, can reduce the ability of predators of mosquito larvae to control mosquito populations. Warmer weather speeds up the larvae’s growth, reducing the amount of time that dragonflies may consume them.
This implies that the number of mosquito larvae that reach maturity in the research region may be twice as high. Even in the presence of the predators that normally regulate the populations, the researchers who studied riverine rock pools at Belle Isle along the James River in Richmond discovered that pools with higher temperatures supported a greater number of aquatic mosquito larvae.
Although it is not a significant disease carrier, the native rock pool mosquito is one of the few in the area that can lay eggs without needing to eat as an adult. Therefore, the results may hold true for related taxa, such as the Asian rock pool mosquito that is invasive.
“We might see larger populations of everyone’s least favourite bug, mosquitos. While the mosquito larvae we studied here [are] the North American rock pool mosquito, these findings apply to species of mosquito that do function as vectors for diseases like West Nile or even Zika virus,” said Andrew T. Davidson, Ph.D., lead researcher on the study.
He conducted the study as part of VCU’s Centre for Integrative Life Sciences Education Ph.D. program.