Love is Deaf

From birdsong to love songs, sound can play an important role in any romance. In some species removing that ingredient can even stop a relationship in its tracks, according to researchers investigating the impact of deafness in mating of disease-carrying mosquitoes. A study examined neurons (brain cells) that express a particular gene essential for hearing in the dengue- and zika-transmitting Aedes aegypti mosquito. The neurons (shown in green) protrude into the brain's auditory centre (pictured), and help transmit sound-induced movement from the antenna. When the gene was silenced, rendering the mosquitoes deaf, males were unable to mate at all, failing to modulate their patterns of wingbeats in sync with females as they normally would during mating. Hearing is therefore not just important, but essential, to mosquito reproduction, which could present a new route to population management and attempts to slow the spread of deadly diseases.

Written by Anthony Lewis

Anthony Lewis

Writer

Ant was the web editor in the early days of BPoD, and has since worked with the UK’s top science organisations as a writer and multimedia producer. He now splits his time between freelance work and managing multimedia at The Lancet.

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• Image from work by Yijin Wang, Dhananjay Thakur and Emma Duge, and colleagues
• Department of Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology, and the Neuroscience Research Institute, University of California, Santa Barbara, CA, USA
• Image originally published with a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
• Published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Science (PNAS), November 2024