Mosquito-borne diseases once considered rural, such as malaria and West Nile virus, are increasingly showing up in cities, challenging public health responses and management strategies.
Shannon LaDeau integrates ecological and social processes — including micro-climate, mosquito behavior and population dynamics, neighborhood disinvestment, and more — to better understand how vector-borne diseases move through urban landscapes and where people are most at risk. She has been studying these dynamics and interactions at organismal to macrosystem scales since the rise of West Nile virus in the early 2000s.
Much of her recent work has taken place in Baltimore, Maryland. As part of the multidisciplinary Baltimore Mosquito Research team, LaDeau has investigated mosquitoes through the lens of ecological and social mechanisms, to uncover how mosquito ecology has adapted to and in turn impacted the urban environment. This work has informed understanding of complex socio-ecological processes that shape and maintain environmental injustices. In Baltimore, the team has generated diverse data to ascertain how legacies of institutionalized racism and ongoing disinvestment tie ecological outcomes, like mosquito abundances and disease risk, to local metrics of wealth and privilege.
LaDeau’s research has revealed how urban conditions, including temperature and humidity, can filter out native mosquito species and facilitate dominance by non-native species and capable disease vectors. The team is exploring how and why social and ecological processes cause spatial variation in mosquito-borne disease risk across diverse neighborhoods. For example, in a 2017 paper, LaDeau and colleagues showed that while precipitation and vegetation cover were important to supporting mosquito populations in disinvested neighborhoods with high infrastructural abandonment, in wealthier neighborhoods mosquito population growth was relatively decoupled from environmental drivers. Furthermore, neighborhood-scale infrastructural abandonment was associated with significantly larger female mosquitoes, and ongoing research is examining functional associations between size differences and a mosquitos’ longevity, fecundity, and ability to transmit disease.
The species composition and condition of adult mosquitoes is significantly impacted by environmental conditions and the availability of plant detritus in the juvenile mosquitoes’ aquatic habitat. LaDeau and colleagues at University of Maryland are currently exploring the importance of plant composition, using differences observed across neighborhoods in Baltimore, for predicting local mosquito abundance and individual mosquito size. Funded by Cary’s Science Innovation Funds, Cary’s Jane Lucas is helping the Baltimore Mosquito Research team identify microbiomes of container habitats where urban mosquitoes breed, and understand how those microbial environments affect the microbiomes of the mosquitoes and their ability to survive and reproduce.
- Publications