Free flight of the mosquito Aedes aegypti

1 Summary High speed video observations of free flying male Aedes aegypti mosquitoes, the dengue and yellow fever vector, along with custom measurement methods, enable measurement of wingbeat frequency, body position and body orientation of mosquitoes during flight. We find these mosquitoes flap their wings at approximately 850 Hz. We also generate body yaw, body pitch and wing deviation measurements with standard deviations of less than 1 • and find that sideways velocity and acceleration are important components of mosquito motion. Rapid turns involving changes in flight direction often involve large sideways accelerations. These do not correspond to commensurate changes in body heading, and the insect's flight direction and body heading are decoupled during flight. These findings call in to question the role of yaw control in mosquito flight. In addition, using orientation data, we find that sideways accelerations are well explained by roll-based rotation of the lift vector. In contrast, the insect's body pitch angle does not correlate with its forward acceleration. This implies that controlling body roll is important to mosquito dynamics. The dynamic importance of stabilizing body pitch and body yaw is less clear. Mosquitoes are a human disease vector. They transmit dengue fever, malaria, and other diseases that impact tens of millions of people worldwide each year [1].Since mosquitoes approach human hosts in flight, and also mate in flight, their flight abilities are central to their role as disease vectors. Because of their prominence as human disease vectors, many studies of mosquito flight have focused on identifying compounds that attract mosquitoes to humans [2,3,4]. In addition, some experimental work has focused on mosquito trapping [5]. Landing site selection on human hosts has also been examined [6]. There is also recent work focusing on observing flight trajectories of individual mosquitoes [7], and on identifying flight distance and dispersal [8]. Very little is known, however, about the flight kinematics of mosquitoes. Making kinematic observations of flying mosquitoes has the potential to inform our understanding of the insect's sensory experience during flight. Such observations also make it possible to examine stability and control during flight. There are few observations of insect orientation during free flight. Because of this, the extent to which insects manipulate their body pitch to generate forward thrust or their body roll to generate sideways thrust is not known. The relationship between body heading and flight heading is also not well characterized. In addition to these …