Yellow fever mosquito

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Yellow fever mosquito
Aedes aegypti, stabbing a person.  The lyre-shaped drawing on the thorax is characteristic.

Aedes aegypti , stabbing a person. The lyre-shaped drawing on the thorax is characteristic.

Systematics
Family : Mosquitoes (Culicidae)
Subfamily : Culicinae
Tribe : Aedini
Genre : Aedes
Subgenus : Stegomyia
Type : Yellow fever mosquito
Scientific name
Aedes aegypti
( Linnaeus , 1762)

The yellow fever mosquito , dengue mosquito or Egyptian tiger mosquito ( Aedes aegypti , synonym since 2004 Stegomyia aegypti ) is a species of mosquito of the tropics and subtropics . It is the main carrier of yellow fever , dengue fever , Zika fever and some other viral diseases .

Description and way of life

Male yellow fever mosquito on the left, female on the right.

The yellow fever mosquito is a small (3–4 mm), dark-colored mosquito with white stripes on its legs and a white drawing on the pronotum ( scutum ) that is reminiscent of a lyre . The proboscis is black.

Females and males are drawn the same, mostly the females are slightly larger. In addition (typical of mosquitoes) the antennae of the males are bushier. As members of the subfamily of the Culicinae, the palps of the males are longer than the proboscis, while they are significantly shorter in the females.

Only the female mosquitoes suck blood after fertilization in order to meet their protein requirements for the production of the offspring. The male mosquitoes mainly feed on nectar and other sweet vegetable juices. The females can also use it to meet their energy needs.

Yellow fever mosquitoes are superbly adapted to survive in a human environment. The preferred host is humans, but other available vertebrates are stung on occasion . They sting at any time of the day, but with a clear preference in the twilight.

Life cycle

Yellow fever mosquito larva

For the yellow fever mosquito to lay eggs, the smallest amounts of standing water, such as those that accumulate in containers, bottles or stored car tires, are sufficient. It can be attracted by signal substances (known as kairomones ) such as nonanoic and tetradecanoic acid , 2-nonanol and their methyl esters , which are produced by microbes living in the water.

The larva develops in the water, where it moults four times and finally pupates. The pupa is also aquatic, mobile and takes about two days to develop. The entire life cycle lasts ten days under optimal conditions, but can be extended to several months in cold weather.

Vector status

Female yellow fever mosquito at the blood meal

Apply yellow fever mosquito, among other species of mosquitoes as Diceromyia furcifer , Aedes (Stegomyia) albopictus and Aedes (Stegomyia) bromeliae as the main vectors of yellow fever virus in the urban cycle and the viral pathogen of dengue fever , the Chikungunya fever , the Rifttalfiebers , the Zika fever and other tropical viral diseases. The yellow fever mosquito is probably out of the question as a vector of Japanese encephalitis .

Genome

The genome of the yellow fever mosquito Aedes aegypti was completely sequenced in 2007 and in the meantime the known number of genes has stabilized. The genetic information is located in three chromosomes . The genome consists of a total of 1,376,422,251 base pairs and 16,047 genes . Almost half of the genome is in DNA transposons .

Spread and control

Originally probably native to Africa , the yellow fever mosquito was spread to other parts of the world by humans. It is now widespread worldwide in the subtropics and tropics . According to some scientists, the expansion of sugar cane plantations created “ideal living conditions for the yellow fever mosquito.” Current research has also confirmed findings in southern Spain, Greece and Turkey.

Traditional methods of combating yellow fever mosquitoes are attempts to kill them by fumigation in residential areas as well as wide-ranging observation and, if necessary, chemical treatment of potential breeding sites in water tanks, puddles and other standing water bodies.

The British company Oxitec carried out the first experimental release with genetically modified ( transgenic ) yellow fever mosquitoes on Grand Cayman in autumn 2009 . The strategy is to release transgenic males, whose offspring die in the larval or pupal stage, which can reduce populations . In the field trial, the population decreased by 80%. Luke Alphey, the company's scientific director, developed the transgenic mosquitoes at Oxford University in the 1990s . The Gates Foundation cooperates with Oxitec as part of its malaria program. Further field tests were carried out in Malaysia in December 2010 and in Brazil since 2011 . Contrary to the original expectation that the offspring of the genetically engineered mosquitoes would not be able to survive in the long term, traces of these genetic modifications were still found in the genome of many mosquitoes in Brazil years later. According to the media, the surviving mosquitoes were now even more resilient. The head of the German institute Testbiotech also stated that the experiments by Oxitec had "led to a largely uncontrollable situation". In subsequent experiments, transgenic mosquitoes were exposed, the male offspring of which - and only these - should be viable.

In an alternative approach, a research team from the University of Cairns in Australia has been testing since 2011 the massive exposure of males infected with the Wolbachia bacterium that can be transmitted to females , which has the ability to infect the dengue virus and thus to pass it on prevented on humans.

Systematics and taxonomy

Stegomyia has long been a subgenus of the genus Aedes . In 2004 this sub-genus was raised to a genus. In many human and veterinary medicine works, the former name Aedes aegypti was still used until the species was reverted to the name Aedes aegypti in July 2015 . Stegomyia is now a subgenus again for all Aedes species that were in the genus Stegomyia from 2004 to 2015 .

See also

  • Asian tiger mosquito (as another species of the genus Aedes , subgenus Stegomyia , with many parallels in distribution, way of life and control)

Individual evidence

  1. a b Richard C. Wilkerson, Yvonne-Marie Linton, Dina M. Fonseca, Ted R. Schultz, Dana C. Price, Daniel A. Strickman: Making Mosquito Taxonomy Useful: A Stable Classification of Tribe Aedini that Balances Utility with Current Knowledge of Evolutionary Relationships. PLoS ONE 10, 7, e0133602, July 2015 doi : 10.1371 / journal.pone.0133602
  2. 2-Undecanon: a new kind of attractant for anthropophilic mosquitoes ( Memento of July 14, 2014 in the Internet Archive )
  3. Spectrogram: How mosquitoes smell putrid water
  4. JP Digoutte: Present status of an arbovirus infection: yellow fever, its natural history of hemorrhagic fever, Rift Valley fever. In: Bull Soc Pathol Exot. Vol. 92, No. 5, 1999, pp. 343-348, PMID 10690474 .
  5. ^ CEG Smith: The history of dengue in tropical Asia and its probable relationship to the mosquitoes Aedes aegypti. In: J Trop Med Hyg. No. 59, 1956, pp. 3-11.
  6. Epidemiological Bulletin 13/2003 of the Robert Koch Institute
  7. P. Hochedez et al .: Chikungunya Infection in Travelers. In: Emerging Infectious Diseases . 2006, Volume 12, No. 10, pp. 1565-1567, ISSN  1080-6040 , ( PDF (128 kB) ).
  8. AF van den Hurk et al .: Vector competence of Australian mosquitoes (Diptera: Culicidae) for Japanese encephalitis virus. In: J Med Entomol. 2003, Vol. 40, No. 1, pp. 82-90, PMID 12597658 .
  9. MapView genome entry
  10. Proteome at UniProt
  11. ^ V. Nene, JR Wortman, D. Lawson et al .: Genome sequence of Aedes aegypti, a major arbovirus vector . In: Science . 316, No. 5832, June 2007, pp. 1718-23. doi : 10.1126 / science.1138878 . PMID 17510324 . PMC 2868357 (free full text).
  12. ^ MJ Nelson: Aedes aegypti: ecology and biology. Pan American Health Organization, Washington DC 1986
  13. ^ Winiwarter / Knoll: Environmental history - an introduction. Böhlau, Cologne 2007, page 247
  14. Der Spiegel 29/2016, p. 47, Marian Blasberg, Hauke ​​Goos, Veronika Hackenbroch: Menschenfeind
  15. ^ GM Mosquito Trial Alarms Opponents, Strains Ties in Gates-Funded Project . In: Science. Vol. 330, November 19, 2010, pp. 1030-1031.
  16. ^ Letting the bugs out of the bag. In: Nature. Volume 470, February 10, 2011, p. 139.
  17. Dengue fever: On a fatal mission ( Memento from August 31, 2013 in the Internet Archive ), radio report (6:17 min.) On: DRadio Wissen from August 26, 2013.
  18. a b Outdoor experiments: Genetically modified mosquitoes discovered in Brazil. In: Spiegel online. September 12, 2019, accessed September 13, 2019 .
  19. Millions of mosquito mutations escaped: an uncontrollable situation with dire consequences. In: www.infranken.de. September 24, 2019, accessed September 25, 2019 .
  20. Eliminating Dengue . TV report (6:58 min.) On: Al Jazeera English from June 4, 2013, accessed on August 26, 2013 (English).
  21. Our Research . Presentation of the project on the website Eliminate Dengue , accessed on August 26, 2013 (English).
  22. Viet Le: Could Wolbachia be an alternative to dengue-fighting GMOsquitos? . In: Public Health Perspectives. dated January 3, 2013, accessed on August 26, 2013.
  23. JF Reinert et al .: Phylogeny and classification of Aedini (Diptera: Culicidae), based on morphological characters of all life stages. In: Zool J Linn Soc. No. 142, 2004, pp. 289-368.

Web links

Commons : Aedes aegypti  - collection of images, videos and audio files
Wiktionary: Yellow fever mosquito  - explanations of meanings, word origins, synonyms, translations