DOI: 10.5061/dryad.1b312
title: Data from: Escaping blood-fed malaria mosquitoes minimize tactile detection without compromising on take-off speed

description: To escape after taking a blood meal, a mosquito must exert forces
 sufficiently high to take off when carrying a load roughly equal to its
 body weight, while simultaneously avoiding detection by minimizing tactile
 signals exerted on the host's skin. We studied this trade-off between
 escape speed and stealth in malaria mosquitoes, Anopheles coluzzii, using
 3D motion analysis of high-speed stereoscopic videos of mosquito take-offs
 and aerodynamic modelling. We found that during the push-off phase,
 mosquitoes enhanced take-off speed by using aerodynamic forces generated
 by the beating wings in addition to leg-based push-off forces, whereby
 wing forces contributed 61% to the total push-off force. Exchanging
 leg-derived push-off forces for wing-derived aerodynamic forces allows the
 animal to reduce peak force production on the host's skin. By slowly
 extending their long legs throughout the push-off, mosquitoes spread
 push-off forces over a longer time window than insects with short legs,
 thereby further reducing peak leg forces. Using this specialized take-off
 behavior, mosquitoes are capable of reaching take-off speeds comparable to
 those of similarly-sized fruit flies, but with weight-normalized peak leg
 forces that were only 27% of those of the fruit flies. By limiting peak
 leg forces, mosquitoes possibly reduce the chance of being detected by the
 host. The resulting combination of high take-off speed and low tactile
 signals on the host might help increase the mosquito's success to
 escape from blood-hosts, which consequently also increases the chance that
 they transmit vector-borne diseases, such as malaria, to future hosts.
description: Database S1: Take-off
 kinematicsMorphology and take-off
 kinematics for all filmed mosquitoes. The database consists of three sets:
 (1) the body position and orientation throughout the complete take-off
 including the push-off phase and the aerial phase for all measured
 mosquitoes (n=63, results shown in Fig 2), (2) the body and wingbeat
 kinematics during the aerial phase for all wing-tracked mosquitoes (n=58,
 results shown in Fig 3), and (3) take-off kinematics of the sub-set of 16
 mosquitoes whereby the full body and wing where tracked throughout the
 complete take-off (n=16, results shown in Fig 4). The body kinematics
 consists of the body position vector and orientation quaternion output
 from the tracker, and the Kalman filtered body position, velocity,
 acceleration and orientation. The wingbeat kinematics consists of the
 pre-Kalman filtered orientation quaternion of the left and right wing, and
 the post-Kalman filtered orientation quaternion and Euler angles (stroke,
 deviation and wing rotation angle) of the left and right
 wing.databaseS1_TakeOffKinematics.zipDatabase S2: Fourier series of wingbeat kinematicsFourier series coefficients of the average wingbeat of all steady flying unfed mosquitoes (n=264 wingbeats), and of the wingbeat modification parameters as a result of increased aerodynamic force production. All Fourier series coefficients are defined by Eqn 7. Using Eqn 7 and 9, one can reconstruct the steady flight wingbeat kinematics for a mosquito with an arbitrary blood-load of F/mg_unfed.databaseS2_FourierSeries.zipDatabase S3: microCT images of mosquito thoraxmicroCT scan results of the thorax of a female malaria mosquito using the TOMCAT beamline of the Swiss Light Source.DatabaseS3_mCT_2Dimages.zip