Duke Mathematical Biology Workshop 2015: Modeling population dynamics of the malaria mosquito under a sex ratio distortion system
Theoretical evolutionary biologists have hypothesized that inducing a male biased reproductive sex ratio in mosquitoes may be an effective way of controlling mosquito populations. By introducing transgenic male mosquitoes that produce predominantly male offspring into the wild mosquito population, one can effectively distort the mosquito reproductive sex ratio such that there will be fewer females in subsequent generations to reproduce, hence resulting in the eradication of the mosquito population. Since the malaria parasite is transmitted only by pregnant female mosquitoes, it is possible to reduce the incidence of malaria by reducing the population of female mosquitoes.
A proof of concept stochastic agent based model is shown in this video. Parameters for the mosquito life cycle were implemented according to documented data for the malaria mosquito Anopheles gambiae (presentation). Note that there are two types of male mosquitoes present : one that is normal and produces male and female offspring at a 1:1 ratio, and one that is transgenic which produces male and female offspring at a 19:1 ratio.
This project was put together at the 2015 Duke Mathematical Biology workshop by Jackie Hudepohl from Carnegie Mellon University, Xiangxi Gao from Emory University and with guidance from Colbert Sesanker, PhD candidate at Duke University. Motivation for this project came from a publication by Galizi et al.(2014).
