Fluid Mechanics Models of a Drinking Mosquito

Danielle Njike, Mark Stremler, Jake Socha, Clement Vinauger and Chloe Lahondere

Abstract

Mosquitoes are responsible for transmitting disease-causing pathogens that kill more than 700,000 people every year. Among more than 3,000 mosquito species, only females of Aedes, Anopheles, and Culex feed on mammalian blood. A mosquito uses a cibarial pump (CP) and a pharyngeal pump (PP) located in their head and operating in series and out of phase to imbibe their food. It is hypothesized that mosquitoes have developed specialized mechanisms unique to their sex and species to effectively handle the diverse challenges associated with consuming fluids like nectar and blood from various sources. To study the internal pumping movements within the head of female mosquitoes, synchrotron x-ray imaging was employed to observe the flow of the feeding solution through the mosquito’s head and synchrotron tomography was used to determine the three-dimensional morphology of key head features in dead mosquitoes. Based on the experimentally measured parameters, a reduce-order mathematical model (ROM) was created to describe the process of fluid pumping by a mosquito. This model takes as inputs the amplitude and frequency of the pump volume variations and gives output values that are difficult to determine experimentally, such as flow rates, pressures, and the mechanical power transmitted to the fluid. In this work we examine how a change in the cibarial pump shape impacts the modeled drinking performance.