A new paper by former Odum faculty member Courtney Murdock and colleagues finds that models of malaria transmission in South Asia that take vector age and species effects into account yield different results than those that don’t. Murdock, now at Cornell University, found that incorporating information about traits like biting, feeding and egg production over the course of the lifespan of the mosquito Anopheles stephensi predicted a broader geographic range of suitable temperature than models that relied on less detailed data from multiple mosquito species.

Read more: Age influences thermal tolerance in Asian malaria mosquito