Shazam for mosquitoes is more than telling you the name of that blood-sucker on your arm by identifying the distinctive musical buzz. It’s citizen scientists conducting surveillance to help create the most detailed global distribution map ever made for mosquitoes. As global warming changes temperatures and precipitation rates throughout the world, habitat for disease-carrying mosquitoes changes too. Diseases like malaria, yellow fever, dengue, West Nile virus, chikungunya and Zika could be moving into your neighborhood and scientists want to know when the first batch of disease-vectors arrives.
Abuzz is a mosquito monitoring app developed by Stanford University professor Manu Prakash.
“We could enable the world’s largest network of mosquito surveillance – just purely using tools that almost everyone around the world now is carrying in their pocket,” said Prakash, who is senior author of a paper that demonstrates the feasibility of this approach, published in the Oct. 31 issue of eLife. “There are very limited resources available for vector surveillance and control and it’s extremely important to understand how you would deploy these limited resources where the mosquitoes are.”
With enough contributions from citizen scientists around the world, Abuzz could create a map that tells us exactly when and where the most dangerous species of mosquitoes are most likely to be present and that could lead to highly targeted and efficient control efforts.
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Knowing when and where these vectors live will help direct mosquito and disease control efforts to the locations that most need them. Diseases carried by mosquitoes kill over half a million people each year and many do not have treatments. Limiting disease by controlling the vectors requires knowing what mosquito species is present and where the insects occur to help locate breeding sites. Monitoring mosquitoes is an expensive, time-consuming, laborious process unsuited for resource-poor areas that often are the hotbed of these diseases.
Enter citizen scientists: a mobile phone in your hand is capable of conducting mosquito surveillance.
We show that even low-cost mobile phones with very basic functionality are capable of sensitively acquiring acoustic data on species-specific mosquito wingbeat sounds, while simultaneously recording the time and location of the human-mosquito encounter.
Here’s all you need to do. Hold your cellphone microphone near a mosquito and record the buzz as it flies. One second of audio recording is preferred although the identification algorithm has worked with as little as one-fifth a second of buzz.
Once the match is found, the researchers will send the person who submitted the recording information about the mosquito they found and mark every recording on a map on the website, showing exactly where and when that mosquito species was sighted.
You don’t even need to wait for the mosquito to land on you. Keep these feet off you and the diseases out of you by helping scientists track mosquitoes.
For any of the grandest aims of Abuzz to be possible, it needs engagement from citizen scientists. Without those contributions, it cannot reach its full potential. The group intends to release an app to facilitate community engagement in the near future and have already produced detailed training videos.
“What I would love to see is people engaging in the problem,” Prakash said. “Try to join the platform. Record mosquitoes. Learn about the biology. And in that process, you will be supporting the kind of research and scientific data that we and medical entomologists around the world so desperately need.
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