Science: Siren’s Song

A female mosquito attracts a male by humming that, to him, sounds very sexy. For years, mean-minded scientists have hoped to duplicate this mating call and use it for the disease-bearing mosquitoes’ destruction.

Last week Dr. Morton C. Kahn of Cornell University Medical College reported that the dirty trick has been played, and that it works fine. Dr. Kahn, unlike Entomologist Hyslop (see below), is fiercely anti-insect. He went to Cuba and made a phonograph record of the song of a female Anopheles albimanus (a malaria carrier). Then he put a powerful loudspeaker in a buzzing Cuban swamp and surrounded it by a deadly electrified screen.

Even when amplified, the mosquito’s love song is only faintly audible to the human ear. But to male mosquitoes it is apparently overwhelming. Dr. Kahn turned on his loudspeaker. A wave of excitement hummed through the swamp. On eager wings the males zoomed toward the trap. Like mariners wrecked by Lorelei’s song, the male mosquitoes smacked against the electrified screen.

Inside, the false electronic siren sang on & on, night after night. She killed, in all, 40,000 males. By the end of the test period, only a few were left to answer her fatal invitation. For two miles around the swamp was almost cleared of males.

Nobody seems to know how often a male mosquito can mate. Perhaps he can mate only once, or at most a few times. If so, a sharp reduction (by siren song) of the number of males in a swamp will condemn most of the females to spinsterhood. They will lay unfertilized eggs and the next mosquito generation will be too sparse to distribute much malaria.