Despite substantial efforts to eradicate mosquitoes, mosquito-borne diseases continue to pose a major threat to human health. Before an adult female mosquito can transmit a disease to a human, however, juvenile mosquitoes must successfully survive development in an aquatic habitat. In urban areas, female mosquitoes often lay their eggs in small, temporary aquatic habitats created by infrastructure for the management of storm water run-off, such as roadside catch basins and drainage ditches. Therefore, a better understanding of the food web ecology of storm water habitats is needed to help explain the distribution and abundance of mosquitoes. Recent scientific advances have the potential to transform the understanding of which factors are most important in determining species distributions and abundances, including the recognition that all animal guts harbor complex communities of microbes, known as the gut microbiome, and that this microbial community has the potential to influence the survival and reproduction of that animal in unexpected ways. This research will examine how a complex set of interactions between the free living microbes, the gut microbiome, the host mosquito, and other members of the aquatic food web, can result in variation in mosquito growth and survival to adulthood, which ultimately affects human disease risk. This research will engage K-5 students in summer research experiences, and provide training to undergraduates in quantitative skills.
Ecological communities often occur as embedded subsets, but an understanding of the feedbacks that occur among these different subsets (e.g., the microbial gut community, the community of hosts) levels is lacking. The ever-increasing power of next generation sequencing technology, and the associated developing theory to interpret it, provides ecologists with the tools needed to gain a better understanding of the relationships between hosts and their microbes in natural systems. Therefore, a major ecological frontier and the objective of this research is to advance the understanding of the drivers of community assembly within embedded ecological systems. The goal is to quantify the feedbacks that govern how communities assemble simultaneously across hierarchical scales from the repeated assembly of food webs in temporary aquatic habitats to the simultaneous assembly of the gut microbiome of individual mosquitoes colonizing those food webs. Two interrelated questions will be addressed using field and laboratory experiments: Is the assembly of the gut microbiota of two important mosquito vectors of West Nile Virus driven by the corresponding assembly of the invertebrate food web? Do microbiome-driven differences in the growth rate of community members influence invertebrate community assembly? The focus on food webs and microbial communities that assemble in larval mosquito habitats also provides a link between community ecology, microbial ecology and disease ecology.
This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
