Listening for mosquito wing noises

Here I go again with really whacky questions.

I was wondering what I could use to detect the 'buzzing' of a mosquito as it flaps its wings and whether it would be possible to detect when one had come into the room by the specific frequency of its wings. It seems to me, although I have not done any real investigation, that the sound of a mozzie is perhaps always at the same frequency.

Is there a particularly sensitive microphone I could use to detect one flying into the room perhaps?
Could I use a couple of parabolic reflector microphones to act like ears to get its direction and distance (loudness of the buzzing) ?
I am sure there are such microphones around which are sufficiently sensitive.

Does anyone know please?

a reply to: qmantoo

Interesting experiment I wanted to do since quite some time...

I would suggest at first doing some qualitative study by catching mosquito in a small enclosure w/t a microphone and do some recording. Possibly a computer w/t high quality sound card would do the job. Recording environmental parameters like temp, humidity and air pressure would be usefull.

Then do spectral analysis and study effect of env. parameters. I strongly suspect they will affect exact frequency emited by mosquito. If that frequency reveal to be constrained inside a limited and computable audio band (depending on env. parameters), then you can design a numeric filter that will "band-pass" only the wings sound. The narrower its bandwidth, the more noise you will reject, thus making your system more sensitive (we assume the detection speed does not need to be very fast).

Its may be possible to use more than one microphone to even triangulate the mosqito position.

Spider use the "hairs" on their body to just do the same thing. These "hairs" reveal the exact position of a passing flying insect within the vicinity of the spider allowing it to catch it. This is also why it is hard to catch a spider, it sense the direction of an incoming air pressure wavefront (like a frog jumping toward) and move accordingly to avoid the danger.

However remember that acoustic is no simple work, you are constantly annoyed by reverberation and resonance effect.

Good luck and please give feedback & results of your experiment.

The frequency can vary depending on wing size and how many flaps the wings are doing which is dependent on if the mozzie is going up down, fast or just cruisin.

Species will vary, there are many variables. Next you have background noise to contend with.

I read that the ones you hear are males and the ones you don't are females.

As for locating them within a room with furniture ... the US military tried to do the same in city streets to locate a snipers first shot. Was not very successful due to reflections from building.

That is all I have.

P

a reply to: qmantoo
Different species and different sexes will have different frequencies. here is some info for you:

We recorded the flight tones and flight-tone interactions produced by tethered wild male and virgin female M- and S-form mosquitoes, individually and in same- and mixed-form pairs under seminatural conditions in Bobo-Dioulasso, Burkina Faso (Figure 1, upper left). Individual male and female mosquitoes flew at mean fundamental wing-beat frequencies (WBFs) similar to those reported previously [15], with males flying at significantly higher WBFs (mean ± standard deviation: M males, 704 ± 25 Hz, n = 4; S males, 682 ± 27 Hz, n = 5) than their conspecific females (M females, 467 ± 31 Hz, n = 6; S females, 460 ± 26 Hz, n = 5; p < 1.0 × 10−7,

www.sciencedirect.com...

Thanks for the comments and info. The females are the blood-suckers as they need the blood for their eggs or some reproduction reasons, cannot remembre now. Anyway, the women are the ones most likely to be in my bedroom ;-). The males I seem to remember feed on plant juices, and have feathery antenna.

This means that males are not likely to be the subject of my attentions as they will not be after my blood.

Hellhound604 - so it looks like we have to detect a range of frequencies between 434 and 498 for that species and as all of you have pointed out, there will probably be variations for other species depending on our global location.

Maybe detectors on the door would be useful. Even if we could detect them in a room which was temporarily empty it would alert us to their presence and we could search them out and remove them. Yes, then there is the doppler effect of them flying away from the detector or towards it.

It is getting complicated already. Maybe the best solution is the one already implemented - a flyscreen.

This is not a snarky question, but are you hearing impaired? Mosquitoes have a very distinctive sound and I can usually hear one as soon as it comes anywhere near, especially if it comes in a room. I can't imagine that high tech equipment would help, unless it's just out of curiosity. It seems you would want a way to keep them out, over a way to just hear them. As far as repellent goes, instead of using all those chemicals in popular brands, I use orange oil. It not only repels flies and mosquitoes, it kills ants and keeps them from coming back for a long, long time. Even after it dries, ants won't come anywhere near it. As a added bonus, it smells much better than anything out of a can. I just spray it around the edges of doors and on the screens covering the windows during the summer and very few get past it. I think I swatted maybe a dozen all season long and they get bad around here.

This is not a snarky question, but are you hearing impaired?

No problem , no, not that I recognise but the mozzies wake me up in the middle of the night, so I am not aware of them while awake, which is what you are referring to I think. Good suggestion about the orange oil I will try it thanks.