TIDE 1022 Computational Thinking for Work and Play
Fall 14
10/6/2014
Dr. Ricardo Cortez
Modeling mosquito host-seeking behavior
Mosquito-borne infections such as West Nile virus are transmitted when infected mosquitos bite humans. The natural hosts of the West Nile virus are birds, so that more mosquitoes can become infected by biting infected birds. Mosquito host-seeking behavior and nonuniform host (bird) distribution are important factors in predicting the transmission dynamics of mosquito-borne infections. I will present a computational model to describe the effect of spatial heterogeneity on the contact rate between mosquito vectors and hosts. The model includes odor plumes generated by spatially distributed hosts, wind velocity, and mosquito behavior based on both the prevailing wind and the odor plume. We compare the effectiveness of different plume-finding and plume-tracking strategies that mosquitoes could use to locate a host. The results show that host finding is optimized by a strategy of flying across the wind until the odor plume is intercepted. When clusters of hosts are more tightly associated on smaller patches, the odor plume is narrower and the biting rate per host is decreased. For two host groups of unequal number but equal spatial density, the biting rate per host is lower in the group with more individuals, indicative of an attack abatement effect of host aggregation.
This is joint work with Bree Cummins, Ivo Foppa, Justin Walbeck, and Mac Hyman.
About the speaker:
Ricardo Cortez is a Professor in the Mathematics Department and Director
of the Center for Computational Science at Tulane University in New
Orleans. His research is in computational fluid dynamics and numerical
analysis. His current interests are developing and analyzing
computational methods for the simulation of biological flows. Of
particular interest are flows generated by swimming microorganisms,
cilia, and other compliant, flexible boundaries in a fluid. As Director
of the Center for Computational Science, Dr. Cortez constantly looks for
potential collaborations among experimentalists and computational
scientists in areas of biomedical engineering, environmental sciences,
material sciences, and other disciplines that are well represented at
Tulane.
Last modified by Carola Wenk,
cwenk -at- tulane -dot- edu,