Talking Mosquitoes

Do mosquitoes talk? Yes, chorused three researchers at the Cornell University Medical College last week. The savants proudly announced in Science that they had succeeded in amplifying and recording mosquito mating calls.

Drs. Morton C. Kahn, William Celestin and William Offenhauser, casting about for new ways to destroy mosquitoes that might be safer and cheaper than insecticides, hit on the idea of luring them into traps. The first step was to find out whether mosquitoes are able to communicate with each other.

Except for the shrill whine of their wings, most varieties make no sound audible to man. But the Cornell researchers caged four of the peskiest species--Anopheles quadrimaculatus (malaria), Aedes aegypti (yellow fever), Aedes albopictus (dengue) and Culex pipiens (New Jersey) --and confronted them with a microphone and high-powered amplifier. A surprising variety of noises, resembling bird calls, emerged. Mosquitoes, it turned out, have voices in the middle ranges of human hearing (frequencies of 250 to 1,500 cycles per second). Females bellow; male voices are thin and high-pitched.

The investigators failed to find out how these sounds are made. But they did find it possible to distinguish mating cries from what appeared to be calls of warning or anger. Mosquitoes apparently never talk to themselves, but when two or more are gathered together, they usually break into eager chatter. A female's bellow invariably brings an answering chorus from all the males within hearing.

Now armed with a number of phonograph recordings of these sounds, the doctors reported that they will soon be ready for the next step: field tests to determine whether the records will "lure the mosquito to some form of destroying mechanism."

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