Modeling Wolbachia Diffusion in Mosquito Populations by Discrete Competition Model

Abstract

Dengue fever is caused by dengue virus and transmitted by Aedes mosquitoes. A promising avenue to control this disease is to infect the wild Aedes population with the bacterium Wolbachia driven by cytoplasmic incompatibility (CI). To study the invasion of Wolbachia into wild mosquito population, we formulate a discrete competition model and analyze the competition between released mosquitoes and wild mosquitoes. We show the global asymptotic properties of the trivial equilibrium, boundary equilibrium, and positive equilibrium and give the conditions for the successful invasion of Wolbachia. Finally, we verify our findings by numerical simulations.