Abstract
We performed a longitudinal study of adult survival of Anopheles darlingi, the most important vector in the Amazon, in a malarigenous frontier zone of Brazil. Survival rates were determined from both parous rates and multiparous dissections. Anopheles darlingi human biting rates, daily survival rates and expectation of life where higher in the dry season, as compared to the rainy season, and were correlated with malaria incidence. The biting density of mosquitoes that had survived long enough for completing at least one sporogonic cycle was related with the number of malaria cases by linear regression. Survival rates were the limiting factor explaining longitudinal variations in Plasmodium vivax malaria incidence and the association between adult mosquito survival and malaria was statistically significant by logistic regression (P<0.05). Survival rates were better correlated with malaria incidence than adult mosquito biting density. Mathematical modeling showed that P. falciparum and P. malariae were more vulnerable to changes in mosquito survival rates because of longer sporogonic cycle duration, as compared to P. vivax, which could account for the low prevalence of the former parasites observed in the study area. Population modeling also showed that the observed decreases in human biting rates in the wet season could be entirely explained by decreases in survival rates, suggesting that decreased breeding did not occur in the wet season, at the sites where adult mosquitoes were collected. For the first time in the literature, multivariate methods detected a statistically significant inverse relation (P<0.05) between the number of rainy days per month and daily survival rates, suggesting that rainfall may cause adult mortality.