Essential Fatty Acids for Mosquitoes, other Insects and Vertebrates

Abstract

As with so much else in insect nutrition, the first demonstration that unsaturated fatty acid was essential in the diet of an insect came from the work of the man we here honor, Gottfried Fraenkel. In the late 1940's he and his associate, M. Blewett, showed that a polyunsaturated fatty acid, either linoleic or linolenic acid, was needed by certain flour moths of the genus Ephestia (Fraenkel and Blewett, 1946). A similar requirement for one or other of these fatty acids has since been demonstrated for many insect species (Dadd, 1977).