Male mosquitos deliver more than sperm when they copulate with females: they also provide a hormone that spurs egg development.
A team led by Flaminia Catteruccia at the Harvard School of Public Health in Boston, Massachusetts, studied the malaria-spreading mosquito Anopheles gambiae, focusing on a protein that is more abundant in females after mating. Tests using mosquito ovaries showed that this protein helps to direct nutrients into developing eggs (pictured, red shapes): when the protein was silenced, fewer eggs were produced (left) than when it was expressed (right).
Further work showed that a molecule in male mating secretions binds to this female protein and boosts its expression, which in turn increases egg production.
This is the first demonstration in insects of an interaction between a male hormone and a female protein that changes female reproductive success, the authors say. Interfering with it, perhaps by creating males that lack the hormone, might help to control populations of disease-carrying mosquitoes.
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Male mosquito boosts egg-making. Nature 503, 9 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1038/503009d
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/503009d
