Hotter weather caused by climate change could mean more mosquitos, according to VCU-led study
by Amelia Heymann, Virginia Commonwealth University
December 18, 2023
A warmer environment could mean more mosquitos as it becomes harder for their predators to control the population, according to a recent study led by Virginia Commonwealth University researchers.
As the cover feature in Ecology, a journal published by the Ecological Society of America, the study — “Warming and Top-Down Control of Stage-Structured Prey: Linking Theory to Patterns in Natural Systems” — found that rising temperatures, often linked to climate change, can make predators of mosquito larvae less effective at controlling mosquito populations. Warmer temperatures accelerate development time of larvae, leading to a smaller window of time that dragonflies could eat them.
This means there could be nearly twice as many mosquito larvae that make it to adulthood in the study area. The researchers looked at riverine rock pools at Belle Isle along the James River in Richmond and found that warmer temperature pools had more aquatic mosquito larvae, even when their predators that naturally control the populations were present.
Read the Ecology paper: https://esajournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ecy.4213