Nutrition accumulation and survival rate of female anopheles dirus (diptera: culicidae)

Abstract

Blood is essential for egg production of an autogenous female mosquito since egg production is dependent on blood feeding, and blood meal protein is the prime nutrition source for egg formation. An. dirus is the most dominant of human malaria in Thailand, it maintains feeding duality that includes vertebrate blood meals for egg production and sugar meals from plants for the synthesis of flight and survival with energy reserve. Characteristic of adult Diptera is that carbohydrate is the sole energy for flight and lipid is the energy source. When at rest, sugar leads to the deposition of glycogen, lipid in the fat body, and glycogen in the flight muscle. In order to investigate the nutrition accumulation pattern among mosquitoes feeding on 1) sugar only, 2) blood only, 3) blood and sugar, and 4) water only, we observed the survival rate of the mosquitoes with various diets and studied the relationship between each diet against their sizes and survival rate. After laboratory An. dirus were reared at different density (50/pan and 500/pan) to produce small and large size adults, we then determined the amount of glycogen, lipid, and sugar in female. Wing length measurement and assays on glycogen, sugar, and lipid were performed on a daily basis for the whole life-time. Since the lipid, sugar, and glycogen content of a single mosquito can be estimated by colorimetric method, sugar content was determined by the anthrone method while the glycogen content was measured by the anthrone method after separation of glycogen with sodium sulphate. Lipid content was determined by extraction of total lipid with chloroform-methanol, conversion of unsaturated lipids to sulfonic acid derivatives, and assay by vanillin-phosphoric acid reagent, respectively. Results and analysis will he discussed