CALIFORNIA, United States (Reuters) — When you next hear the high pitched whine of a mosquito, researchers from Stanford University in California, are hoping you’ll reach for your smartphone, not the repellent.
The idea is to put mosquitoes under a world-wide surveillance operation using the recording device in nearly everyone’s pocket.
Mosquitoes can be differentiated by the frequency of their wingbeats, which is what produces their characteristic whine.
The team are calling for citizen scientists to record the sound of a mosquito and upload it to the ‘Abuzz’ website, a kind of Shazam for mosquitoes.
Once uploaded, an algorithm will match the particular buzz with the species that is most likely to have produced it and mark every recording on a map on the website, showing exactly where and when that mosquito species was sighted.
With enough contributions from citizen scientists around the world, Abuzz could create a map that tells us exactly when and where the most dangerous species of mosquitoes are most likely to be present and that could lead to highly targeted and efficient control efforts.
The website is designed to work with recordings as short as one second long, from almost any model of cellphone.
More than mere pests, mosquitoes can carry deadly diseases, including malaria, yellow fever, dengue, West Nile virus, chikungunya and Zika.
Diseases spread by mosquitoes result in millions of deaths each year and the burden of their effects is carried most strongly by places with the fewest resources.
The group intends to release an app to facilitate community engagement in the near future and have already produced detailed training videos.