2016/17: Mark, release, recapture studies
Male mosquitoes were fed a dye (Rhodamine B)
MRR studies in Innisfail East and Silkwood
Male mosquitoes don’t bite, they feed off nectar, so don’t transmit disease. Our research is focusing on using the male mosquito to reduce or remove urban populations of the diseases carrying mosquito species Aedes aegypti.
To inform our future studies we needed to know more about the behaviour of the male mosquito. To do this we carried our a series of ‘mark, release, recapture’ studies.
These studies involved:
2. Marking the male mosquitoes in the lab with a dye.
3. Releasing these marked males from single and multiple static points, and then from a moving vehicle.
4. Recapturing the males through a network of traps.
5. Studying the data to see how far the males had flown from the release point, in what time, and if they had mated in that time.