Itching to fix mozzie threat

DEEP in the labs of the JCU campus, a scientist appeared totally calm as she propped her legs against a box full of mosquitoes and allowed them to bite her through mesh netting.

“This is pretty common,” JCU researcher Kimberley McLaughlin explains nonchalantly as the mosquitoes feed. “We need to keep them fed and healthy, so they can reproduce. Someone has to do it.”

Ms McLaughlin, part of a team of JCU researchers who are looking to stop malaria in a way no one else has before, has done extensive research into the part of the malarial mosquito’s life that we know almost nothing about, their larvae.

“No one ever looks at the larval stage, no one cares about the aquatic stuff, but the majority of the mosquito’s life is in the aquatic stage,” Ms McLaughlin said.

“It’s hard to find and tricky to look into, so it was all sort of uncharted territory.”

Ms McLaughlin began her journey with mosquitoes in the Solomon Islands.

“I was looking into the Anopheles mosquitoes. They’re the ones specific to the spread of malaria,” she said.

“We wanted to see how we could prevent malaria by affecting the mosquitoes themselves.”

She trekked through the thick rainforests of the Solomon Islands, using a machete to hack through thick vegetation, looking for the deadly larvae.

“In India they have algal mats, which all the larvae hide under, but in the Solomons we don’t have that,” she said.

“Yet there’s still big clumps of larvae and we don’t really know what’s attracting them, and no one has ever tried to find these places before.”

Ms McLaughlin said the research was all somehow new, even though malaria is such a big problem.

“This year was the first year they rolled out a new insecticide in the last 40 years, so over that time the mosquitoes have been building up a resistance,” she said.

“Even for bed nets mosquitoes are starting to evolve.

“They used to only bite you at night when you were asleep, but now because we have bed nets they’ve learned to bite you outside.”

Ms McLaughlin hopes the vast information she has gathered will lead to developing a new method for stopping the bloodsuckers in their tracks.

“Every day we come closer to pinpointing ways to slow larval production, with pH, with crowding, with temperature,” she said.

“It really goes to show that sometimes the solution to problems is about looking where no one else is.”

She began to peel her legs away from the mesh boxes, gently coaxing the mosquitoes away from the netting.

She rubbed the red welts that angrily covered her calves.

“They’ll go down pretty quickly, I’ve built up a tolerance,” she explained.

After all, these mosquitoes were what her research was based on. “This is one of the most extensive studies that has ever been carried out into mosquito larvae,” she said.

“I measure absolutely everything.

“The idea is that if we know about the larval stage and how that’ll go on to affect them as adults then we can develop control methods, because right now we’ve got bed nets and insecticides and all of the stuff that comes with treating the adult stages, and nothing for when they’re most vulnerable.”

Email Kimberley McLaughlin kim. mclaughlin@ jcu. edu. au to learn more.