Wolbachia invasion to wild mosquito population in stochastic environment

Releasing Wolbachia-infected mosquitoes to invade the wild mosquito population is a method of mosquito control. In this paper, a stochastic mosquito population model with Wolbachia invasion perturbed by environmental fluctuation is studied. Firstly, the well-posedness, positivity, and Markov-Feller property of the solution for this model are proved. Then a group of sharp threshold-type conditions is provided to characterize the long-term behavior of the model, which pinpoints the almost necessary and sufficient conditions for the persistence and extinction of Wolbachia-infected and uninfected mosquito populations. Our results indicate that even for a low initial Wolbachia infection frequency, a successful Wolbachia invasion into the wild mosquito population can be driven by stochastic environmental fluctuations. Finally, some numerical experiments are carried out to support our theoretical results.(c) 2023 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.