Shazam for Mosquitoes
An unexpected call led one scientist to develop an easy way of tracking the animal that endangers more humans than any other.
It was late on a Friday night, and Haripriya Mukundarajan was trying to record the annoying buzz of a mosquito’s wings.
To fight mosquitoes and the diseases they carry, you need to know where they are—which species, in which places. Everything else flows from that. A lot of labor goes into trapping, counting, and identifying the insects, but Mukundarajan figured there might be an easier way. Mosquitoes give themselves away through the vexing whine of every wingbeat. If Mukundarajan could find an easy way of tracking that sound, perhaps she could develop an easy mosquito-detector. So there she was in her lab at Stanford,, conducting the world’s unlikeliest recording session, with high-performance microphones that they had borrowed.
