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About the Authors:
Suellen de Oliveira
Roles Conceptualization, Data curation, Formal analysis, Validation, Visualization
Affiliation: Fundação Oswaldo Cruz, Fiocruz-RJ, Instituto Oswaldo Cruz, Laboratório de Mosquitos Transmissores de Hematozoários, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
Daniel Antunes Maciel Villela
Roles Conceptualization, Data curation, Formal analysis, Methodology, Validation, Writing - review & editing
Affiliation: Fundação Oswaldo Cruz, Fiocruz-RJ, Programa de Computação Científica, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
Fernando Braga Stehling Dias
Roles Formal analysis, Methodology, Software, Visualization
Affiliation: Fundação Oswaldo Cruz, Fiocruz-CE, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
Luciano Andrade Moreira
Roles Conceptualization, Funding acquisition, Writing - review & editing
Affiliation: Fundação Oswaldo Cruz, Fiocruz-MG, Instituto René Rachou, Mosquitos vetores: Endossimbiontes e Interação Patógeno-Vetor, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
Rafael Maciel de Freitas
Roles Conceptualization, Funding acquisition, Investigation, Methodology, Project administration, Resources, Supervision, Writing - original draft, Writing - review & editing
* E-mail: [email protected]
Affiliation: Fundação Oswaldo Cruz, Fiocruz-RJ, Instituto Oswaldo Cruz, Laboratório de Mosquitos Transmissores de Hematozoários, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
ORCID http://orcid.org/0000-0002-2198-6492Abstract
Background
Wolbachia has been deployed in several countries to reduce transmission of dengue, Zika and chikungunya viruses. During releases, Wolbachia-infected females are likely to lay their eggs in local available breeding sites, which might already be colonized by local Aedes sp. mosquitoes. Therefore, there is an urgent need to estimate the deleterious effects of intra and interspecific larval competition on mosquito life history traits, especially on the duration of larval development time, larval mortality and adult size.
Methodology/principal findings
Three different mosquito populations were used: Ae. aegypti infected with Wolbachia (wMelBr strain), wild Ae. aegypti and wild Ae. albopictus. A total of 21 treatments explored intra and interspecific larval competition with varying larval densities, species proportions and food levels. Each treatment had eight replicates with two distinct food levels: 0.25 or 0.50 g of Chitosan and fallen avocado leaves. Overall, overcrowding reduced fitness correlates of the three populations. Ae. albopictus larvae presented lower larval mortality, shorter development time to adult and smaller wing sizes than Ae. aegypti. The presence of Wolbachia had a slight positive effect on larval biology, since infected individuals had higher survivorship than uninfected Ae. aegypti larvae.
Conclusions/significance
In all treatments, Ae. albopictus outperformed both wild Ae. aegypti and the Wolbachia-infected group in larval competition, irrespective of larval density and the amount of food resources....