Data from: Adaptive periodicity in the infectivity of malaria gametocytes to mosquitoes

Daily rhythms in behaviour, physiology, and molecular processes are expected to enable organisms to appropriately schedule activities according to consequences of the daily rotation of the Earth. For parasites, this includes capitalizing on periodicity in transmission opportunities and for hosts/vectors, this may select for rhythms in immune defence. We examine rhythms in the density and infectivity of transmission forms (gametocytes) of rodent malaria parasites in the host's blood, parasite development inside mosquito vectors, and potential for onwards transmission. Furthermore, we simultaneously test whether mosquitoes exhibit rhythms in susceptibility. We reveal that at night, gametocytes are twice as infective, despite being less numerous in the blood. Enhanced infectiousness at night interacts with mosquito rhythms to increase sporozoite burdens four-fold when mosquitoes feed during their rest phase. Thus, changes in mosquito biting time (due to bed nets) may render gametocytes less infective, but this is compensated for by the greater mosquito susceptibility.malaria infection data from mice and mosquitoesMalaria parasite prevalences and densities (gametocytes, oocysts and sporozoites) for mosquito infections of 4 treatment groups, comprising mosquitoes feeding on mice at "mosquito daytime" or "mosquito night time" and ingesting either rodent malaria parasites at "parasite daytime" or "parasite night time"malariaHawking2018.csvMosquito actiogram raw data (trikinetics monitor file) used to generate average activity profile in figure S2.Locomotor Activity Monitor units (LAM 25) (TriKinetics, Waltham, MA, USA) record individual female mosquito locomotor flight activity. Data were processed using ClockLab software (Actimetrics, Wilmette IL) to generate figure S2, showing the 24-hr activity profile averaged over 3 days of activity for 32 females.mosquito_actiogram_Hawking2018.tx