Addition of a single bacterial isolate to conventional larval rearing water can impact wing size and longevity in adult male Aedes aegypti

Camden M. Dezse; Noha K. El-Dougdoug; Sarah M. Short

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0350944

Abstract

Male mosquitoes are mass-reared around the globe for use in mosquito control programs like Sterile Insect Technique and Incompatible Insect Technique. During larval development, mosquitoes co-exist with complex microbial communities that serve as food and also form the internal microbiota of the organism. The microbiota can impact multiple larval and adult life history traits including development rate and male body size. In the present study, we investigated how larval development, male wing length and adult male longevity is impacted by the addition of a single bacterial isolate to otherwise conventional larval rearing water. Of three isolates tested, we found that larval exposure to one, Cedecea sp., resulted in slowed pupation and adult males with significantly reduced wing length and longevity. Our findings suggest that minor modifications of the microbial community during larval development can have life-long effects on mosquitoes which, like many organisms, acquire their microbiota from the environment. Moreover, they suggest that changes to the larval water microbial community could impact the efficacy and efficiency of mosquito mass rearing for vector control.

Citation: Dezse CM, El-Dougdoug NK, Short SM (2026) Addition of a single bacterial isolate to conventional larval rearing water can impact wing size and longevity in adult male Aedes aegypti. PLoS One 21(6): e0350944. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0350944

Editor: Nikos T. Papadopoulos, University of Thessaly School of Agricultural Sciences, GREECE

Received: September 5, 2025; Accepted: May 20, 2026; Published: June 24, 2026

Copyright: © 2026 Dezse et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

Data Availability: All relevant data are within the paper and its Supporting Information file and were also submitted to Dryad under DOI 10.5061/dryad.79cnp5j9r.

Funding: Research reported in this publication was supported by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases of the National Institutes of Health in the form of awards (R21AI174093 and R01AI189572) received by SMS. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Institutes of Health. Additional support for this study was provided by the Ohio State University Infectious Diseases Institute, and the Ohio State University College of Food, Agricultural, and Environmental Sciences in the form of start-up and seed funding received by SMS. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.

Competing interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

Background

Sterile insect technique (SIT) and Incompatible Insect Technique (IIT) are widely used methods of biological control to manage populations of insects [1–6]. In both SIT and IIT, released males mate with wild females and resulting offspring are nonviable, causing populations of targeted insects to decrease [7–10]. Historically, this technique has seen great success in the control of the screw-worm fly and other fruit fly pests [11], and multiple versions of SIT/IIT have resulted in successful local control of Ae. aegypti [8, 12–15]. Success of this technique relies in part on efficient and cost-effective mass-rearing of male insects that are able to reliably mate with wild females. Life history traits that may be relevant to the success of SIT/IIT include larval development/pupation rates, synchronization of development times, adult body size, and longevity [16].

The bacterial microbiota, i.e., the bacteria found within and in association with Ae. aegypti mosquitoes, has been shown to influence the rate and overall success of development, wing length, and longevity in both males and females [17–22] as well as reproduction and vector competence in females [21–28]. Therefore, the microbiota may have the potential to impact the efficiency of mass rearing and the quality of mosquitoes produced by mass rearing facilities [29]. However, most of the studies investigating impacts of the microbiota on mosquito traits have focused on female mosquitoes (because of their role in pathogen transmission via blood feeding). It is imperative to better understand the effects of the microbiota on male mosquitoes, because male mosquitoes are used extensively in vector control techniques like SIT and IIT. Moreover, most previous studies have been conducted under conditions where the conventional microbiota was removed, and extraneous microbes were continuously excluded (i.e., monoxenic or gnotobiotic settings). Controlled studies of this nature are extremely valuable for understanding the mechanistic role of the microbiota in mosquito life history traits but may be less relevant in an applied setting where gnotobiotic rearing would be impractical. Additionally, Roman et al., 2024 [30] showed that addition of Asaia bacteria to Ae. aegypti larval rearing water induced significant changes in pupation rate when the conventional microbiota was intact but not when it was removed, suggesting that applying microbial treatments in the presence of the conventional microbiota has the potential to reveal effects on mosquito life history traits that would otherwise remain hidden.

In the current study, we amended the rearing water of Ae. aegypti larvae with one of three bacterial isolates previously cultured from Ae. aegypti mosquitoes—Asaia sp., Cedecea sp., and Kocuria sp. This was done under non-sterile rearing conditions that allowed for the formation of a conventional microbiota. We then measured pupation, as well as wing length—as a proxy for body size—and longevity in adult males that arose from each treatment versus a control group with no microbiota manipulation. We chose these bacterial strains because Asaia bacteria have been shown to alter pupation success and development time in Ae. aegypti under gnotobiotic and non-gnotobiotic conditions [27, 30] as well as male wing length under gnotobiotic conditions [27]. Cedecea bacteria can form a biofilm in the larval digestive tract and have the capacity to competitively exclude other microbes from colonizing Ae. aegypti [31, 32]. Kocuria has not been directly implicated in alteration of mosquito life history traits to our knowledge, but it is a Gram-positive bacteria previously found to be associated with multiple mosquito species [33–35].

Methods

Mosquito rearing

We reared Ae. aegypti (Liverpool strain) using standard rearing conditions and rabbit blood (Hemostat, USA), as described in MacLeod et al., 2021 [36]. The mosquitoes were maintained at 27°C and a relative humidity of 80% on a 14h light: 10h dark cycle.

Experimental set-up and bacterial treatment of mosquito larvae

The effects of three different genera of bacteria were investigated: Asaia sp., Cedecea sp., and Kocuria sp. Strains of these genera were previously isolated from Ae. aegypti digestive tracts [37, 38] and have been maintained in 15% glycerol stocks since isolation. We Sanger sequenced the 16S rRNA gene from each strain using primers fd1 and rp1 [39]. Sequences were trimmed and aligned using Unipro UGENE (v 52.1) and submitted to Nucleotide BLAST using default parameters and the nr/nt Nucleotide collection database. This revealed that the best match for Kocuria sp. is Kocuria rhizophila (partial sequence length = 1382 bp, query cover = 100%, percent identity = 100%, E value = 0.0), for Asaia sp. is Asaia krungthepensis (partial sequence length = 1351 bp, query cover = 100%, percent identity = 99.85%, E value = 0.0) and for Cedecea sp. is Cedecea neteri (partial sequence length = 1403 bp, query cover = 100%, percent identity = 100%, E value = 0.0), S1 File. For each of four independent experiments, four groups were created: a control group consisting of larvae with no bacterial amendment, and three groups of larvae where we amended the larval water with live bacteria from one of the aforementioned genera (Fig 1). Each larval rearing tray was established with 200 first-instar larvae, one liter of reverse osmosis (RO) water, and two pieces of autoclaved orange cat food (each 200–250 mg) (9Lives Indoor Complete dry cat food). The treatment groups then each received an additional 10⁸ Colony Forming Units (CFUs) of one bacterial isolate suspended in 1X PBS, and the control group received a volume of 1X PBS equal to the mean volume of suspended bacteria added to the other treatments. Trays were handled on the open benchtop and the microbiota was allowed to form conventionally, with the exception that bacterial amendments were added to the three experimental trays.

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Fig 1. Experimental design.

Four groups were created: a control group consisting of larvae with a conventional, unaltered microbiota, and three groups of larvae with bacteria added to the larval rearing water in addition to the conventional microbiota. Each larval rearing tray received n = 200 larvae, sterile water, and dry cat food. The treatment groups each received 10⁸ CFUs of a single bacterial isolate suspended in 1X PBS, and the control group received 1X PBS. The larvae from each group developed into pupae which were counted daily and placed into plastic cages with mesh lids. Three days post peak eclosion, 25 male mosquitoes from each group were placed into small soup cups with mesh lids to measure longevity, and the right wings of all remaining adult male mosquitoes were measured. The full experiment was replicated four times, and total sample sizes were (88-139) for longevity and (35-96) for wing length measurement for each treatment.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0350944.g001

Starting on the first day of pupation, pupae were counted daily, transferred to cups, and placed in large plastic cages with mesh lids. Adults were allowed to feed ad libitum from a 10% sucrose solution in a bottle located in each cage until three days post peak eclosion, at which point males were separated from females based on standard morphological features [40] and transferred to smaller containers for longevity observation.

Pupation rate and success measurement

Starting on the first day of pupation, pupae were counted daily and these data were used to estimate pupation rate. On the last day of pupal counting, overall pupation success was estimated as the total number of pupae obtained per tray divided by the initial number of larvae in the tray (n = 200 for all trays). Larval carcasses were not counted during development, however, at the conclusion of pupal counting, fewer than 6 living larvae remained in any given tray (S1 File). Thus, all unaccounted for individuals from the initial pool of 200 larvae were assumed to have died during development and were recorded as such.

Wing length measurement

Wing length is a measurement used to estimate body size of mosquitoes [40]. Using a binocular microscope (Leica S9i) and subsequent analysis in ImageJ v1.53, the right wings of males from each treatment were measured to the nearest 0.01 mm. Wings were measured from the distal end of the alula to the tip of the R3 vein [41].

Longevity measurement

Three days post peak eclosion, all mosquitoes from each container were cold anesthetized and 25 male mosquitoes from each group were placed into pint-size cardboard cups with mesh lids and allowed to feed ad libitum on a 10% sucrose solution. Each day, dead individuals were removed until no live individuals remained in the cups.

Statistical analysis

Statistical analyses were conducted using R statistical software and R Studio [42, 43] and the packages ggplot2 [44], magrittr [45], ggpubr [46], survival [47,48], survminer [49], and betareg [50]. Because overall wing size varied substantially across replicates (S1 Fig), we opted to group mean-center the wing length data by subtracting the average wing length for each replicate from all data points within that replicate. We then used a two-way ANOVA with treatment and replicate as the predictor variables followed by pairwise contrasts using Tukey’s method. To analyze pupation and survival data, we first fitted curves using the Kaplan-Meier method. In order to assess the effect of treatment on survival, we fit a Cox proportional-hazards model with treatment as a predictor variable. We initially included replicate in the model as well, but the assumption of proportional hazards was not met for the replicate variable, therefore we opted to exclude it from our final model. To assess the effect of treatment on pupation rate, we used Log-rank tests because the effect of treatment did not meet the assumptions of proportional hazards. To assess the effect of treatment on the proportion of individuals that successfully pupated, we used a beta regression with treatment and replicate as predictor variables. All raw data can be found in Supplementary S1 File. R code and output for all analyses and figures can be found in Supplementary S2 File.

Results

Effect of bacterial treatment on pupation rate and pupation success

Bacterial treatment had a significant effect on the rate of pupation (Fig 2A, p < 2 x 10⁻¹⁶). Treatment with Cedecea resulted in significantly slower pupation compared to the negative control group; pupation in Cedecea-treated individuals occurred during days 6−10 while pupation for the negative control occurred during days 5−8 (Fig 2A, p_{Cedecea vs. Neg. ctrl.} < 2 x 10⁻¹⁶). Treatment with Asaia and Kocuria was not significantly different from that of the negative control (p_{Asaia vs. Neg. ctrl.} = 0.46; p_{Kocuria vs. Neg. ctrl.} = 0.50). In addition to changes in pupation rate, we observed a high amount of larval mortality in the Cedecea treatment, which resulted in a lower proportion of individuals reaching pupation compared to the negative control (Fig 2B; p_{Cedecea vs. Neg. ctrl.} < 5.61 x 10⁻¹⁰). No significant difference in pupation success was induced by Asaia or Kocuria compared to the negative control (Fig 2B; p_{Asaia vs. Neg. ctrl.} = 0.18, p_{Kocuria vs. Neg. ctrl.} = 0.08).

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Fig 2. Pupation rate and proportion of individuals to successfully pupate are significantly lower in the Cedecea treatment.

Male and female pupae were counted daily for each treatment starting on the first day of pupation. All treatments were initiated with 200 larvae per tray, and data were collected from three replicate experiments. (A) Kaplan-Meier curves showing the probability of pupation over time for each treatment. Bacterial treatment was found to significantly affect pupation rate using a Log-Rank test (p < 2 x 10⁻¹⁶) and pairwise Log-Rank tests indicated that Cedecea significantly slowed pupation rate compared to the negative control (p_{Cedecea vs. Neg. ctrl.} < 2 x 10⁻¹⁶). In contrast, neither Asaia nor Kocuria treatment significantly altered pupation rate (p_{Asaia vs. Neg. ctrl.} = 0.46; p_{Kocuria vs. Neg. ctrl.} = 0.50). Individuals that died as larvae were excluded from this analysis. Total sample sizes are as follows: Negative control, n = 549; Asaia, n = 521; Cedecea, n = 325; Kocuria, n = 570). (B) Stacked bar plot showing the average proportion of individuals from each treatment that were live pupae, live larvae, or dead larvae at the conclusion of the pupal counting period (n = 3 replicate proportion values per category per treatment). A beta regression analysis revealed that Cedecea treatment significantly reduced the proportion of individuals that successfully reached pupation compared to the negative control (p_{Cedecea vs. Neg. ctrl.} < 5.61 x 10⁻¹⁰). In contrast, neither Asaia nor Kocuria treatment significantly altered the proportion of individuals to reach pupation (p_{Asaia vs. Neg. ctrl.} = 0.18; p_{Kocuria vs. Neg. ctrl.} = 0.08).

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0350944.g002

Effect of bacterial treatment on wing length

The effect of bacterial treatment on the wing lengths of adult male Ae. aegypti was assessed. Treatment had a significant effect on male wing length (Fig 3; F_3,265 = 6.07, p = 0.00052, and pairwise comparisons via Tukey’s HSD revealed that males from the Cedecea treatment had significantly shorter wings than males from the negative control treatment (Fig 3; p = 0.001) while those from the Kocuria treatment (Fig 3; p = 0.985) and the Asaia (Fig 3; p = 0.596) treatment did not.

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Fig 3. Wing lengths are significantly shorter for adult males from the Cedecea treatment compared to the negative control.

Right wings of adult males from each treatment were measured from the alular notch to the tip of the R3 wing vein. The experiment was repeated four times. Due to variation in overall wing size between replicates, data were mean-centered within replicate prior to analysis. Points on each box plot represent individual group mean-centered male samples. Treatment significantly impacted wing length (F_3,265 = 6.07, p = 0.00052). P values indicate significant differences between treatments and the negative control as revealed by Tukey’s HSD. Total sample sizes were as follows: Negative control, n = 78; Asaia, n = 98; Cedecea, n = 36; Kocuria, n = 60.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0350944.g003

Effect of bacterial treatment on longevity

Bacterial treatment significantly affected male adult lifespan (Fig 4A; p = 0.022). Pairwise contrasts indicated that Cedecea significantly decreased longevity when compared to the negative control (Hazard ratio_{Cedecea vs. Neg. ctrl.} = 1.58, p = 0.007), while Asaia and Kocuria did not (Hazard ratio_{Asaia vs. Neg. ctrl.} = 1.18, p = 0.25; Hazard ratio_{Kocuria vs. Neg. ctrl.} = 0.96, p = 0.80) (Fig 4B-D).

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Fig 4. Longevity is significantly reduced for adult males from the Cedecea treatment.

Three days post peak eclosion, males from each treatment were collected and placed into cups to measure longevity. (A) Survival probability was estimated using the Kaplan-Meier method, and a Cox proportional hazards model was applied. Bacterial treatment was found to significantly affect survival (Likelihood ratio test = 9.6, p = 0.02). Pairwise comparisons of longevity between treatment groups and the negative control indicated that (B) Asaia treatment had no effect on longevity relative to the negative control (Hazard ratio_{Asaia vs. Neg. ctrl.} = 1.18, p = 0.25), (C) Cedecea treatment significantly decreased longevity compared to the negative control (Hazard ratio_{Cedecea vs. Neg. ctrl.} = 1.59, p = 0.007), and (D) Kocuria treatment had no effect on longevity compared to the negative control (Hazard ratio_{Kocuria vs. Neg. ctrl.} = 0.96, p = 0.80). The experiment was repeated 3-4 times per treatment and total sample sizes were as follows: Negative control, n = 90; Asaia, n = 98; Cedecea, n = 59; Kocuria, n = 95.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0350944.g004

Discussion

We found that amendment of larval water immediately after hatching with bacteria from the genus Cedecea had a significant effect on pupation rate and the proportion of individuals that reached pupation, as well as body size and longevity of adult male Ae. aegypti. When compared to a control group receiving no additional bacterial treatment, Cedecea-treated individuals were slower to pupate and fewer individuals survived to pupation. Additionally, adult male Ae. aegypti from the Cedecea treatment group had smaller bodies (estimated via wing length) and decreased longevity. This adds further support to the growing body of evidence that microbes in aquatic habitats impact the life history of mosquito larvae and subsequent adults. Moreover, it suggests that bacterial amendments to conventional larval rearing water can shape male mosquito life history traits even when the microbiota is otherwise allowed to form naturally.

The bacterial microbiota of Ae. aegypti, especially during larval development, has been shown to play a key role in shaping life history traits of adult mosquitoes. For example, the larval microbiota has been repeatedly shown to influence pupation [17–21,27,28,30] as well as adult female [18, 20, 21, 28] and male [18, 20] wing length. Adult longevity has also been shown to be impacted by the larval microbiota, however, evidence of this is much more plentiful for females [18, 19, 21, 22, 27, 28] than for males [19, 22]. While it is common for mosquito microbiota research to focus on females due to their importance in pathogen transmission, we chose to investigate male mosquitoes because of their use in vector control strategies such as SIT and IIT, both of which utilize the mass rearing and subsequent release of male insects [1–6]. Another way in which our study deviated from the majority of previous studies (but see [30]) was in our larval habitat set-up. Most prior studies investigating the impacts of different bacteria on mosquito life history traits have utilized a gnotobiotic rearing system in which the native microbiota was removed and larval water conditioned with a single bacterial isolate and maintained aseptically to ensure monoxenic conditions [17, 20, 21, 27, 28]. In the current study, we intentionally did not remove the native microbiota from the surface of the eggs and handled the larval trays non-aseptically to determine if addition of bacterial amendments can impact male life history traits under non-gnotobiotic conditions.

Our findings suggest that addition of a single bacterial isolate to an otherwise conventional larval rearing environment has the capacity to alter pupation time as well as adult male Ae. aegypti wing length and longevity. However, only one isolate, Cedecea sp., elicited a response, therefore it remains unclear how generalizable this effect may be and further studies on a larger panel of bacterial and/or fungal isolates are warranted. We note that the reduction in wing length as a result of Cededea exposure was robustly observed in two replicate experiments; in a third replicate, which was underpowered for the Cedecea treatment, we also observed this same relationship between Cedecea and the negative control. However, in one replicate, we observed similar wing lengths between the negative control and the Cedecea-treated group. Perhaps notably, average wing length was highest in this replicate. This suggests that the effect of Cedecea treatment on wing length could potentially be condition-dependent, i.e., the effect of Cedecea on body size may be most pronounced when males are otherwise stressed.

Another open question is whether the effects of Cedecea would persist without the native microbiota or whether they are dependent on its presence. Roman et al., 2025 [30] found that effects of Asaia spp. bacteria on Ae. aegypti pupation arose from an interaction with the native microbiota. The bacterial taxa present in the natural larval habitat have been shown to have complex interactions amongst themselves and with developing larvae (e.g., [51]), which further highlights the value of observing microbiota-host interactions in ecologically and practically relevant contexts, rather than solely in gnotobiotic or axenic systems.

Our findings that larval Cedecea exposure slows pupation, reduces overall pupation success, and results in smaller and shorter-lived adult males are informed by previous research showing that Cedecea species form biofilms in the larval digestive tracts of Ae. aegypti larvae and competitively exclude other bacterial taxa from colonizing [31, 32]. This could have significant implications for mosquito life history, especially if Cedecea is pathogenic or is suppressing the colonization of microbes that are beneficial to development. The fact that, on average, only 51.7% of Cedecea-treated larvae survived to pupation suggests that treatment with this microbe is having a profoundly negative effect on mosquito fitness in the larval stage. Microbes serve as a key source of nutrition for mosquitoes [52] and provide necessary micronutrients, such as B vitamins [53]. Cedecea-mediated dysbiosis could potentially disrupt beneficial functions of the microbiota leading to smaller adult males with shortened longevity. Metabolic changes induced in larvae due to interactions with microbes have been seen to affect adult fitness later in development [21], making the aforementioned explanation plausible. However, further study into Cedecea-mosquito-microbiota interactions in the context of male life history traits is needed to test this hypothesis.

A key caveat to our study is that we did not evaluate the persistence of Cedecea after addition to the larval water during the first instar. Larval exposure to different microbes can result in transcriptomic and metabolic changes that have carryover effects into adult stages [21]. However, it is possible the added bacteria failed to persist in the aquatic environment and/or never colonized the larvae themselves. In this case, the effects we detected could have been a result of an early, fleeting larval exposure to the bacteria and/or an effect of the bacteria on the microbial community which then had subsequent effects on larval development and/or adult male traits. Exposure to Asaia bacteria early in larval development impacts pupation success, but not through persistent colonization of larvae but rather because of concurrent changes to the co-occurring microbial community [30]. Notably, previous studies have shown that when Cedecea is present in the larval water, it is also found in larvae and adults, suggesting that bacteria from this genus have some degree of persistence across developmental stages [36]. Nonetheless, further research is warranted to determine how Cedecea bacterial amendment of the larval water alters the microbiota of the aquatic habitat and the larvae overall and the extent to which effects on mosquito traits are directly and/or indirectly related to Cedecea exposure.

Neither Asaia nor Kocuria impacted pupation or the adult male traits we measured in this study. This is particularly surprising for Asaia, given that bacteria from the genus Asaia have been shown to alter the pupation success and rate of development in Ae. aegypti under gnotobiotic and conventional conditions [27, 30], as well as male wing length under gnotobiotic conditions [27]. Larvae in our study were not reared gnotobiotically, which may explain why we did not observe an effect on male wing length. Moreover, Roman et al., 2024 [30] showed that Asaia krungthepensis (the Asaia species most closely related to the strain used in the current study) added to conventional larval rearing water are found in larvae at three days post-hatching but are largely absent by six days post-hatching. Perhaps, therefore, Asaia do not persist long enough in a conventional larval rearing environment to elicit an effect on wing length or adult male longevity. The fact that we did not observe an effect of Asaia on pupation in our study could be due to differences in Asaia strains between studies or possibly due to differences between studies in composition or structure of co-occurring microbiota.

Conclusion

This study demonstrated that the addition of a single bacterial isolate, Cedecea sp., to the larval habitat of Ae. aegypti resulted in increased larval mortality, lower numbers of pupae, slowed pupation, and adult male mosquitoes with reduced wing size and longevity compared to individuals arising from larval habitats with no bacterial amendments. This suggests that minor changes to the microbial community during larval development can impact mosquitoes well into adulthood. Unlike the majority of research into the mosquito microbiota, which utilizes axenic or gnotobiotic systems, our findings emphasize the profound effects that microbial treatments can have even in the presence of a conventionally formed microbiota. Furthermore, by focusing on male mosquitoes, our work highlights the potential importance of the microbiota for mass-rearing protocols used in SIT and IIT programs. Expanding this line of inquiry to include additional microbial taxa could further elucidate how microbes affect mosquito development and how those effects may be harnessed to improve vector control.

Supporting information

S1 File. All raw data used in the manuscript, as well as Sanger sequences used to identify the best match taxonomic ID for bacterial isolates.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0350944.s001

(XLSX)

S2 File. All R code and outputs from all analyses performed in the manuscript.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0350944.s002

(TXT)

S1 Fig. Wing length data parsed by replicate. These are the same data used in Fig 3, but here each replicate is plotted separately.

Points on each box plot represent individual male samples and data are not mean-centered. Treatment significantly impacted wing length in replicate 1 (F_3,70 = 3.91, p = 0.012), replicate 3 (F_3,65 = 6.31, p = 0.0008), and replicate 4 (F_3,89 = 7.78, p = 0.0001), but not in replicate 2 (F_3,32 = 1.33, p = 0.28). Letters indicate significant differences between treatments as revealed by Tukey’s HSD within each replicate (p < 0.05). Total sample sizes were as follows: Negative control, n = 78; Asaia, n = 98; Cedecea, n = 36; Kocuria, n = 60.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0350944.s003

(TIF)

Acknowledgments

We wish to thank Dom Magistrado for feedback on analyses and all current and former members of the Short lab for helpful guidance and feedback.

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Figures

Abstract

Background

Methods

Mosquito rearing

Experimental set-up and bacterial treatment of mosquito larvae

Pupation rate and success measurement

Wing length measurement

Longevity measurement

Statistical analysis

Results

Effect of bacterial treatment on pupation rate and pupation success

Effect of bacterial treatment on wing length

Effect of bacterial treatment on longevity

Discussion

Conclusion

Supporting information

S1 File. All raw data used in the manuscript, as well as Sanger sequences used to identify the best match taxonomic ID for bacterial isolates.

S2 File. All R code and outputs from all analyses performed in the manuscript.

S1 Fig. Wing length data parsed by replicate. These are the same data used in Fig 3, but here each replicate is plotted separately.

Acknowledgments

References