No Flowers Please

These charming yellow flowers belong to a thorny shrub known as Prosopis juliflora, commonly known as mesquite. Its hardiness and drought tolerance mean that it has quickly become an invasive and unwanted weed in many parts of the world. As well as being a problem for gardeners and farmers, the plant’s flowers bring a problem of their own: they provide sugary nectar that insects love to drink, including mosquitoes infected with the parasite that causes malaria. Scientists working in Mali, West Africa, have done a simple but ingenious experiment to see whether cutting off the bright mesquite flowers can cut down the numbers of their mosquito feeders too. They found a big drop in mosquito populations in areas where the shrubs had been cut, especially in the numbers of blood-sucking females that carry the malaria parasite, showing that simply pruning these bushes could make a major difference to malaria transmission.

Written by Kat Arney

Kat Arney

Writer

Dr Kat Arney is an award-winning science writer, broadcaster and public speaker, and is the founder and Creative Director of First Create The Media.

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• Image by J.M.Garg
• Research from Department of Microbiology and Molecular Genetics, IMRIC, Kuvin Centre for the Study of Infectious and Tropical Diseases, Faculty of Medicine, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel
• Image originally published under a Creative Commons Licence Share Alike (BY-SA 4.0) licence
• Research published in Malaria Journal, July 2017