During my PhD, I presented my first poster at the 15th Ecology & Behavior meeting in Strasbourg in 2022. This conference was organized by PhD students from my master’s cohort, who combined excellent organisation with a friendly touch, so I enjoyed very much to come back to this city.
This poster is associated with this paper: (Dessart et al., 2023)
Poster
References
2023
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Assessing learning in mosquito larvae using video-tracking
Martin Dessart, Miguel Piñeirúa, Claudio R Lazzari, and Fernando J Guerrieri
Journal of Insect Physiology, 2023
Mosquito larvae display a stereotyped escape response when they rest attached to the water surface. It consists in detaching from the surface and diving, to return to the surface after a brief time. It has been shown that this response can be evoked several times, by repeatedly presenting a moving shadow. Diving triggered by a potential danger revealed as a simple bioassay for investigating behavioural responses in mosquito larvae, in particular their ability to learn. In the present work, we describe an automated system, based on video-tracking individuals, and extracting quantitative data of their movements. We validated our system, by reinvestigating the habituation response of larvae of Aedes aegypti reared in the laboratory, and providing original data on field-collected larvae of genera Culex and Anopheles. Habituation could be demonstrated to occur in all the species, even though it was not possible to induce dishabituation in Culex and Anopheles mosquitoes. In addition to non-associative learning, we characterised motor activity in the studied species, thanks to the possibility offered by the tracking system to extract multiple variables. The here-described system and algorithms can be easily adapted to multiple experi mental situations and variables of interest.
