Widely available in India, to attract-and-trap the male fruit flies, is the pheromone (methyl eugenol) lure. There appears to be no pheromone for the female mosquitoes to attract the males, or vice versa. Signalling by sound waves and wing beat frequency is how the swarm of male mosquitoes attract more males and females.
Why not record the real ‘song’ from a mosquito swarm and replay it on the field? Hearing the replayed Mosquito Swarm Song, the males will fly to join the Imaginary Swarm I-Swarm and the females will fly to meet the imaginary males. Traps at the I-Swarm, similar to the fruit fly pheromone traps or fanned net traps, will despatch the real mosquitoes to their end.
Let us audio record a real mosquito swarm using a mobile phone. Then we audio replay the record on a I-Swarm trap, again with the mobile phone. Will mosquitoes rush to the I-Swarm? If the I-Swarm is placed at the same location where the real swarm was formed, the mosquitoes should reach there with or without I-Swarm. But if the I-Swarm is placed at a location where swarms were not seen earlier, but mosquitoes arrive then the I-Swarm works!
The audio recording mobile is to be placed such that if we play it, it should sound like a real swarm. So place the I-Swarm device at the real swarm location and place the recording mobile so that it faces the mobile on the I-Swarm. Afterwards the I-Swarm is removed and we wait for the mosquito swarm,
The swarm is formed. We audio record the Mosquito Swarm Song.
The recorded Mosquito Swarm Song is played on the I-Swarm mobile. The mosquitoes hear the song and arrive.
To do the experiment, can we not use an existing audio recording available with some researchers or online somewhere? It is worth checking at Prakashlabs, http://web.stanford.edu/group/prakash-lab/cgi-bin/labsite/ if they have a recording.
