Music to their ears: Mosquitoes use annoying whine to charm mates

Music to their ears: Mosquitoes use annoying whine to charm mates

By Daily Mail Reporter
Last updated at 4:44 PM on 09th January 2009

It's a sound that sends humans diving under the duvet or reaching for a rolled-up newspaper.

But for one type of disease-carrying mosquito, the whine of beating wings is sweet romantic music.

Courting pairs of the insects serenade each other by performing a remarkable duet in the air.


Sweet serenade? Scientists say mosquitoes use the buzzing sound created by their beating wings to court each other

Both adjust the pitch of their individual whines upwards until they both match at the same frequency - 1,200 hertz.

The findings surprised researchers who had assumed that female mosquitoes were deaf.

Mosquitoes of the species Aedes aegypti spread both yellow and dengue fever.

Scientists believe interfering with their acoustic courtship ritual might make it possible to control populations of the pest in disease-hit areas.

The female A. aegypti mosquito normally produces a wing-beat frequency of 400 hertz.

The male whine is higher pitched, with a frequency of 600 hertz.

During courtship, the frequencies of both are raised to a 'harmonic', or multiple of their respective pitches, so that they arrive at the same frequency of 1,200 hertz.

This exceeds what was previously thought to be the insects' upper hearing limit.

The U.S. research, led by Dr Ronald Hoy at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, appears today in the journal Science.

The scientists studied the mosquitoes by tethering insects to pins and recording their flight tones with a special microphone.

Minute electrodes implanted into the mosquitoes' hearing organs showed they were sensitive to sound frequencies of up to 2,000 hertz.

The researchers wrote: 'Once mated, females are much less responsive to male flight tones and less likely to perform tone matching.'

Source: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1110203/Music-ears-Mosquitoes-use-annoying-whine-charm-mates.html