Blood feeding (when a adult female mosquito seeks out and feeds on a
blood host) is a crucial invariant in
Micro-MoB, and models of mosquito-borne pathogen
transmission (MBPT) generally. Blood feeding is an algorithm which uses
information provided by the interface from each component to compute
values which give the distribution of bites from mosquitoes onto hosts,
and the rate that mosquitoes feed. The blood feeding function
(compute_bloodmeal()) is in R/bloodmeal.R.
Below is a schematic describing visually the quantities that are generated in the blood meal algorithm. Different colors refer to different components: green indicates values from the human component, blue indicates values from the adult mosquito component, and yellow indicates values from the other blood hosts and visitor components.
Values which are computed by the blood meal which are not directly involved with transmission are in red, and values that are directly relevant for transmission are in grey.