Abstract Mosquitoes are vectors of numerous pathogens that cause infectious diseases, and they pose a significant global health burden as a result. As such, more reliable field-relevant models to study mosquito population dynamics and life history traits such as development time and survival of mosquito larva would be of great value. In Aedes mosquitoes, progression through early life stages is known to be density-dependent. Despite its importance, density dependence is largely ignored or oversimplified in many existing simulation models, leading to less accurate predictions of development and survival during the early life stages. Furthermore, density dependence is frequently assumed to impact only larval survival and not development time in models, despite empirical evidence for density-dependent development. Here, we develop a discrete-time model of mosquito larval population dynamics which accounts for density impacts on both survival and development time. We demonstrate the validity of our model using publicly available semi-field data of larval density and pupation time across a six-month experiment. Using our model, we found that incorporating density dependence during larval development is important to the accurate prediction of mosquito pupation. This is especially true when considering density-dependent development time for mosquito larva as opposed to density-dependent larval survival. We determined that the incorporation of simple functional forms to describe density dependence in simulation models gives improved prediction results over models that ignore density dependence entirely. Such simple functional forms can easily be incorporated into existing models, and thus help improve field-relevant models of mosquito population dynamics, particularly in Aedes and other container-inhabiting mosquitoes that are known to experience density dependence during larval development.

中文翻译：

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密度依赖性在幼蚊发育和生存中的重要性：基于模型的调查

摘要 蚊子是导致传染病的众多病原体的载体，因此它们对全球健康构成了重大负担。因此，研究蚊子种群动态和生活史特征（如蚊子幼虫的发育时间和存活率）的更可靠的现场相关模型将具有重要价值。在伊蚊中，已知生命早期阶段的进展与密度有关。尽管它很重要，但在许多现有的模拟模型中，密度依赖性在很大程度上被忽略或过度简化，导致早期生命阶段对发育和生存的预测不太准确。此外，尽管有经验证据表明密度依赖性发育，但密度依赖性通常被认为仅影响模型中的幼虫存活而不影响发育时间。这里，我们开发了蚊子幼虫种群动态的离散时间模型，该模型考虑了密度对存活和发育时间的影响。我们在为期六个月的实验中使用公开可用的半场幼虫密度和化蛹时间数据证明了我们模型的有效性。使用我们的模型，我们发现在幼虫发育过程中结合密度依赖性对于准确预测蚊子化蛹很重要。在考虑蚊子幼虫的密度依赖性发育时间而不是密度依赖性幼虫存活时尤其如此。我们确定，在模拟模型中结合简单的函数形式来描述密度相关性，比完全忽略密度相关性的模型提供了更好的预测结果。