Female mosquitoes need a blood meal to reproduce, and in obtaining this essential nutrient they transmit deadly pathogens. Although crucial for the spread of mosquito-borne diseases, blood feeding remains poorly understood due to technological limitations. Indeed, studies often expose human subjects to assess biting behavior. Here, we present the biteOscope, a device that attracts mosquitoes to a host mimic which they bite to obtain an artificial blood meal. The host mimic is transparent, allowing high-resolution imaging of the feeding mosquito. Using machine learning, we extract detailed behavioral statistics describing the locomotion, pose, biting, and feeding dynamics of Aedes aegypti, Aedes albopictus, Anopheles stephensi, and Anopheles coluzzii. In addition to characterizing behavioral patterns, we discover that the common insect repellent DEET repels Anopheles coluzzii upon contact with their legs. The biteOscope provides a new perspective on mosquito blood feeding, enabling the high-throughput quantitative characterization of this lethal behavior.
Pubmed ID: 32960173 RIS Download
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A Python-based environment of open-source software for mathematics, science, and engineering. The core packages of SciPy include: NumPy, a base N-dimensional array package; SciPy Library, a fundamental library for scientific computing; and IPython, an enhanced interactive console.
View all literature mentionsComputer vision and machine learning software library which provides a common infrastructure for computer vision applications. The algorithms within the library can be used to detect and recognize faces, identify objects, classify human actions in videos, track camera movements and moving objects, extract 3D models of objects, produce 3D point clouds from stereo cameras, stitch images together to produce a high resolution image of an entire scene, find similar images from an image database, and follow eye movements, recognize scenery and establish markers to overlay it with augmented reality. It has C++, C, Python, Java and MATLAB interfaces.
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