Mosquitoes escape looming threats by actively steering into the bow-wave induced by the attacker

To detect and escape a threat, night flying insects must rely on other senses than vision alone. Here we study how anthropophilic malaria mosquitoes can escape a swatting hand in the dark using high-speed videography and numerical simulations. We show that these night flying mosquitoes escape looming objects by using the object-induced airflow in two ways. They first actively steer into the bow-wave  produced by the attacker, and then passively travel with this bow-wave away from the attacker; these two aspects explain two-thirds and one-third of their escape accelerations, respectively. Thus, flying mosquitoes being attacked in the dark rely both on airflow-sensing to trigger their escape, and on attacker-induced airflow to maximize their escape performance. Similar escape strategies are probably common among small lightweight insects.

, , , ## Data Files on Dryad

**Data_S1_-_Experiment 1**
Database of the experiment #1. Flight tracks of all Anopheles coluzzii mosquitoes attacked by the (real and virtual) mechanical swatter, and flying in various light conditions. A Matlab (all_data.mat) file containing three-dimensional tracks of all flying mosquitoes, described as the time t (s) and the spatial {x, y, z} (m) coordinates of the mosquito at each video frame. The coordinates are in meters, and in the world reference frame as defined in figure 1, with z oriented vertically up, and the origin of the coordinate frame at the center of the flight arena. The trajectories were determined as described in the materials and methods. Metadata for each track includes age, swatter type (hollow or solid) and mode (on or off), light condition, as well as temperature and humidity over time in the arena during each experiment. In addition, the file contains the kinematic of the mechanical swatter, as well as the geometry of the flight arena...