The effects of three release strategies on Wolbachia infection frequency in mosquito populations

ABSTRACT

In control of wild mosquitoes to fight mosquito-borne diseases, release of mosquitoes with Wolbachia is one of the effective biological control methods. There are three release strategies, namely releasing both Wolbachia-infected females and males, only Wolbachia-infected females and only Wolbachia-infected males. All these three strategies have been confirmed to be capable of speeding up the Wolbachia persistence in mosquito populations. In this paper, we investigate how supplementary releases affect the Wolbachia spread dynamics in mosquito populations. Our aim is to compare the effectiveness among these three release strategies. We obtain theoretical results and provide numerical simulations that show that the first two strategies are more effective than the last strategy. For the first two strategies, the former strategy is either less effective than the latter strategy in each generation, or more effective than the latter strategy in previous generations, and then becomes less effective in late generations.

KEYWORDS:

• Wolbachia infection frequency
• release strategies
• mosquito populations
• dengue fever

AMS SUBJECT CLASSIFICATIONS:

• 39A60
• 92B05
• 92D25
• 92D30

Acknowledgments

The authors thank two anonymous reviewers for their careful reading and valued comments and suggestions.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work is supported by National Natural Science Foundation of China (No: 12071095).