Research · Insect
Mosquitoes
Thermosensation while foraging
Heat and CO₂ plumes are intermittent and turbulent. How do foraging mosquitoes use these cues to locate a host?
Foraging mosquitoes find food sources in the environment using thermal and chemical cues that have a complicated intermittent structure due to turbulence. How do insects use this intermittent information to locate sources?
With the Daniel, Riffell and Dickinson labs, we study the behavioral and neurophysiological responses of mosquitoes to temporal patterns in heat and CO₂ plumes.
Selected papers
- Vinauger et al. (2019). Visual-olfactory integration in the human disease vector mosquito Aedes aegypti. Curr Biol 29, 2509–2516.
- Pang et al. (2018). History dependence in insect flight decisions during odor tracking. PLoS Comput Biol 14, e1005969.
- van Breugel et al. (2015). Mosquitoes use vision to associate odor plumes with thermal targets. Curr Biol 25, 2123–2129.