Using Mathematics to Unravel Mosquito Behavioral Dynamics that Capacitates Malaria Parasite Success in a Human-Mosquito Built Environment

Many bottlenecks can hamper a successful malaria parasite transmission from one human to another. For example, a successful transmission of the parasite from humans to mosquitoes and back to humans requires that a susceptible feeding female mosquito successfully feed on two distinct humans – one infected with the parasite and the other susceptible, at two distinct sequential time points. In addition, the parasite must be in its transmissible form in the human as well as in the mosquito at the latter feeding. There is also no guarantee that the feeding would succeed-it may lead to the mosquito’s death. If it succeeds, the mosquito may not be successful in infecting a human. The bottlenecks involved illuminate how the human-mosquito interaction enhances the parasite’s exploitation of the evolutionary and reproductive needs of mosquitoes to ensure the parasite’s survivability. Therefore, understanding this complex process, viewed from the lens of transmitting mosquitoes, also driven by their evolutionary need to survive, is essential. Preliminary work has shown that interesting dynamics can be observed even under simple mass action assumptions. Moreover, our methods allow for the incorporation of multiple feeding and mosquito gonotrophic cycles and their contributions to mosquito abundance which then directly and indirectly have consequences for malaria intensity and transmissibility success. It also illuminates how a mosquito’s age is linked to disease transmissibility success when the parasite’s dynamics is incorporated into an interactive model that captures the interaction of mosquitoes, humans and the malaria causing parasite. A by-product of explicitly incorporating the mosquitoes’ gonotrophic cycles is the implicit embedding of the extrinsic incubation period of the disease in the modeling framework. In this talk, I will present some results that have been obtained from a complex system aimed at understanding malaria disease transmissibility via the lens of the transmitting mosquito.