Fig. 5: Mosquito longevity and parasite’s strength determine the evolution of Plasmodium sporogonic cycle.

Evolved sporogonic development time (Tsp) at the end of the evolutionary simulations (at t = 10,000 days). a We simulated two additional mosquito populations with different age-dependent death rates by changing the shape parameter (x) of the Gompertz distribution, resulting in younger (x = 0.18) and older (x = 0.089) mosquitoes compared to our previous simulations. b We also modified the slope of the Hill function describing the mosquito-to-human transmission probability \({p}_{{{{{{{{\rm{M\to H}}}}}}}}}({{{{{{{{\rm{N}}}}}}}}}_{{{{{{{{\rm{BM}}}}}}}}})={p}_{0}+\frac{{n}_{BM}}{{n}_{BM}+h}\), effectively modeling parasites with low (h = 2), intermediate (h = 1), or high (h = 0.5) scavenging strength. Note that the simulations ran with parameters x = 0.16 and h = 1 correspond to the results depicted in Fig. 4. All simulations were started with a fast initial sporogonic development (Tsp(0) = 10 days). Box plots show the median with first and third quartile, whiskers depict min and max values. Summary of N = 10 stochastic simulations.