Scientists at Stanford University have created a mosquito sound library that can be used to differentiate species. This library and its corresponding algorithm facilitate the use of mobile phones to create a crowd-sourced mosquito surveillance network.
The researchers are asking citizen scientists to help acquire data on mosquito distribution by recording the insect’s whining buzz, while also noting the time and location of the encounter. The team says the data collected will help map mosquito distribution worldwide and also aid in the development of better strategies to control mosquitoes and combat mosquito-borne diseases.
Manu Prakash, assistant professor of bioengineering at Stanford, explains that anyone with a mobile phone can contribute to Abuzz, the mosquito monitoring platform his lab developed to produce a detailed global map of mosquito distribution.
"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 yesterday in 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, he believes that 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.
Contributing to this research is as simple as holding a cellphone microphone near a mosquito, recording its hum as it flies and uploading the recording to the Abuzz website. The researchers take the raw signal, clean up that audio to reduce background noise, and run it through an algorithm that matches that particular buzz with the species that is most likely to have produced it.
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.
"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 and, at the same time, you will be making your own community safer."
Image: Felix Hol, left, Haripriya Mukundarajan and Manu Prakash record mosquitoes on campus. Image courtesy of Kurt Hickman/Stanford News Service