Pathobiological Sciences Department, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, WI, USA.
Departamento de Zoologia, Universidade Federal do Paraná, Avenida Coronel Francisco H. dos Santos, Jardim das Américas, Curitiba, PR, Brazil.
J Insect Sci. 2020 Nov 1;20(6). doi: 10.1093/jisesa/ieaa119.
Mosquitoes (Diptera: Culicidae) in the Culex pipiens complex play a key role in the transmission and therefore epidemiology of a number of human and animal pathogens globally. These mosquitoes, and sympatric species of the genus Culex Linnaeus that are not within the Cx. pipiens complex, are often considered 'impossible' to distinguish by morphology in the adult female stage. In the United States, this is particularly true for Culex pipiens s.l. and Culex restuans Theobald, both of which are competent vectors of West Nile virus, but likely play different roles in the transmission cycle. Therefore, we undertook an in-depth morphological evaluation of matched larval exuviae and adult specimens that revealed five useful morphological characters that are informative to distinguish Cx. pipiens s.l. from Cx. restuans in the adult stage. Herein, we provide a comprehensive review of the literature on these species of interest, and four additional, morphologically similar, Culex species, and a proposed key to adult female specimens.
在全球范围内，库蚊属（双翅目：蚊科）中的蚊子在多种人类和动物病原体的传播和因此流行病学中起着关键作用。这些蚊子以及与库蚊复合种群共生的不属于库蚊复合种群的属的种类，在成虫阶段通常被认为在形态上“不可能”区分。在美国，这对于库蚊复合种群和库蚊 restuans 特别如此，两者都是西尼罗河病毒的有效传播媒介，但在传播周期中可能发挥不同的作用。因此，我们对匹配的幼虫蜕和成虫标本进行了深入的形态评估，揭示了五个有用的形态特征，可以在成虫阶段区分库蚊复合种群和库蚊 restuans。在此，我们对这些相关物种的文献进行了全面回顾，并提供了另外四个形态相似的库蚊种以及一个成年雌性标本的鉴别钥匙。
