A spatiotemporal ecological-epidemiological model for malaria-borne mosquito control

Malaria remains one of the world's most persistent infectious diseases, driven by complex interactions among human mobility, vector ecology, and environmental heterogeneity. Because mosquito larvae concentrate in aquatic habitats, biological control using larvivorous fish has long been used as a sustainable complement to insecticides. However, introducing predatory fish creates a central ecological trade-off where the same intervention that suppresses mosquito emergence also disrupts native aquatic communities. Addressing this concern, we develop a spatiotemporal eco-epidemiological framework that links vector-borne human pandemic spread, mosquito population movement and reproduction dynamics, and two interacting fish populations in which one intervention fish is introduced to consume larvae, and a native fish population is to be conserved. Within this framework, we compare a one-time offline deployment strategy with a dynamic monitoring strategy that updates fish release in response to local system states. Our results identify conditions under which adaptive deployment achieves a better balance between reducing human infections and preserving native fish, offering a principled basis for ecologically informed malaria control in heterogeneous urban landscapes. Quantitatively, both the offline and the monitoring strategy avert roughly two-thirds of the no-intervention infection burden and differ only modestly in epidemiological outcome. The monitoring strategy attains comparable infection control at a lower native-fish loss.