Fig. 5: Octopamine injection causes mild effect in female malaria mosquitoes.
Tests of auditory biophysics were conducted after injecting two different solutions: control ringer and 1 mM octopamine concentrations. Blue boxplots (left) show ZT4 data, and red (right) ZT12. (a–d) Biophysical parameters were extracted from fitting damped harmonic oscillator functions to the flagellar responses to frequency-modulated sweeps, including peak and oscillator frequencies, the acceleration (F0/m) and the Q-factor. Octopamine injection had mild effects on female mosquito hearing compared to males. e Steady-state stiffness values extracted from force-step stimulation responses. Central line, median; box limits, first and third quartiles; lower and upper whiskers, 5th and 95th percentiles, respectively. The tables underneath each graph display the n numbers (total number of runs (stimulated sections) that passed the curation process and are included in the analysis), median and median absolute deviation (mad) for each of the categories shown in the graph above. Octopamine injection caused a small increase in flagellar stiffness at ZT4. Significant differences between injection effects starred (two-sided Wilcoxon rank-sum tests with Holms procedure for multiple comparison correction, *p.adj <0.05; **p.adj <0.01; ***p.adj <0.001). OA octopamine, ZT zeitgeber time. Sample sizes: ZT4 control = 8; ZT4 OA1mM = 7; ZT12 control = 5; ZT12 OA1mM OA = 8.
