A delayed differential equation model for mosquito population suppression with sterile mosquitoes

Abstract

The technique of sterile mosquitoes plays an important role in the control of mosquito-borne diseases such as malaria, dengue, yellow fever, west Nile, and Zika. To explore the interactive dynamics between the wild and sterile mosquitoes, we formulate a delayed mosquito population suppression model with constant releases of sterile mosquitoes. Through the analysis of global dynamics of solutions of the model, we determine a threshold value of the release rate such that if the release threshold is exceeded, then the wild mosquito population will be eventually suppressed, whereas when the release rate is less than the threshold, the wild and sterile mosquitoes coexist and the model exhibits a complicated feature. We also obtain theoretical results including a sufficient and necessary condition for the global asymptotic stability of the zero solution. We provide numerical examples to demonstrate our results and give brief discussions about our findings.