Artificial intelligence trained to 'recognise' both living and dead mosquitoes could help track the three species most responsible for transmitting mosquito-borne diseases.
Mosquitoes kill more people than any other animal because they can transmit diseases such as dengue, malaria and Zika virus fever. Using AI to automatically identify different mosquito species could make it easier to track their presence worldwide – but such an AI needs many images of mosquitoes to learn from.
Songhua ONG at the Institute for Tropical Biology and Conservation in Malaysia and his colleague recruited three volunteers to help them image yellow fever mosquitoes (Aides Egypt), Asian tiger mosquitoes (Aides albopictus) and southern house mosquitoes (Cule quinquefasciatus). The researchers took two photos of each mosquito that landed on the volunteers’ hands: one right after it landed and another after it was splatted.
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Some mosquitoes bit the volunteers before getting smashed, but others were killed before they got the chance. “We aim to create images that are similar to real life,” says ONG.
In total, the researchers took 1500 images, half of alive mosquitoes and half of those that had been splatted.
Australia is grappling with its first major outbreak of Japanese encephalitis, a viral disease that has already killed two people. The mosquito-transmitted infection is typically found in rural regions of Asia, but climate change is thought to have driven it further south – and other diseases could follow suit.
Nineteen people have tested positive for the infection across four Australian states: Victoria, New South Wales, South Australia and Queensland. A man in his 60s from Victoria and another man in his 70s from New South Wales have died from the virus.
The outbreak has taken many experts by surprise. “Japanese encephalitis virus was completely off the radar for us,” says Roy Hall at the University of Queensland in Brisbane.
The virus is transmitted via Culex mosquitoes that have previously bitten an infected animal, such as a pig or waterbird.
Experts believe the infection may have entered Australia after recent floods along the east coast created additional wetlands. These may have attracted migratory waterbirds from Asia, carrying the virus over. “We know these birds often follow flooded watercourses,” says Hall.
Local mosquitoes may have bitten these birds as they travelled along the waterways. Australia’s mosquito population is higher than normal due to its recent warm, wet weather assisting the insects’ breeding.
Once mosquitoes are infected, they can pass the virus to dense populations of pigs in commercial farms, causing an “amplifying effect”, says Hall. Mosquitoes that bite infected pigs can spread the virus to people who work with or live near the animals. Japanese encephalitis cannot spread from person to person.
The virus has already been detected in pigs at more than 20 Australian farms, with some fearing the infection could spread to the country’s millions of feral pigs. “These pigs move over very wide ranges,” says Gregor Devine at QIMR Berghofer Medical Research Institute in Brisbane.
Record-breaking rainfall, flooding and warm temperatures may have created a “perfect storm” that allowed the Japanese encephalitis virus to gain a foothold in Australia, with climate change potentially being to blame, says Karin Leder at Monash University in Melbourne.
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