Ronald Hoy
David and Dorothy Merksamer Professor in Biology
with Ronald Hoy
Ronald Hoy is the David and Dorothy Merksamer Professor in Biology at Cornell University. He earned a B.S. in zoology and psychology from Washington State University and a Ph.D. in biological sciences from Stanford University, where he was a graduate student in Don Kennedy's lab; his thesis was on neural regeneration in crayfish. At the University of California-Berkeley, Hoy did post-doctoral work with David Bentley on the genetics of communication in crickets. He then joined the faculty in neurobiology and behavior at Cornell University. Besides teaching at Cornell, he has taught neuroscience and behavior at Cold Spring Harbor Labs and at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, where he was a director of the neural systems and behavior course and, later, director of the Grass Foundation summer fellows program.
References
- Harmonic Convergence in the Love Songs of the Dengue Vector Mosquito Science, February 20, 2009: Vol. 323, no. 5917, pp. 1077-1079
Cornell entomologists have discovered that male and female mosquitoes (Aedes aegypti), which can spread such diseases as yellow and dengue fevers, "interact acoustically with each other when the two are within earshot--a few centimeters of each other," said Ron Hoy, professor of neurobiology and behavior.
"The frequency at which males and females converge is a harmonic or multiple of their wing-beat frequencies, which is approximately 400 hertz [vibrations per second] for the female and 600 hertz for the male," said Hoy.
The mating duet, generated just before the couple mates on the fly, settles at around 1,200 hertz--roughly an octave and a half above concert A (the pitch to which instruments are tuned--the A that has a frequency of 440 hertz and is above middle C). "That is significantly higher than what was previously thought to be mosquitoes' upper hearing limit," he added.
Interestingly, the mosquitoes adjust the harmonic resonance of their thoracic box to produce a harmonic frequency that converges at a frequency that is the female's third harmonic (three times her fundamental frequency) and the male's second harmonic (two times his fundamental frequency). The study also is the first to definitively show that, contrary to previous thought, female mosquitoes are not deaf.
The researchers hope that their work will provide new ways to better control mosquito populations in places where yellow and dengue fevers are significant problems.
(Excerpted from the Cornell Chronicle Online, January 8, 2009)