Fricker Stephen R, Keppel Gunnar, Williams Craig R
UniSA STEM, University of South Australia, Adelaide, Australia.
Med Vet Entomol. 2025 Jun;39(2):335-350. doi: 10.1111/mve.12787. Epub 2025 Jan 26.
We investigated the mosquito community along 315 km of the Murray River, where we identified three assemblages (upper, middle, and lower river) that exhibited different patterns of species richness and diversity over 20 years. In the lower reaches (i.e., more southern latitudes), species richness and community diversity declined over time, while there was no significant change in either the middle or upper reaches. While the overall mean abundance of the common, pathogen-carrying mosquito (Diptera: Culicidae) species Aedes camptorhynchus Thomson, increased in the lower river but declined in the upper river. These results provide important information on the diversity and abundance of mosquito communities adjacent to the Murray River and highlight the importance of considering spatial and temporal variation when assessing the risk of mosquito-borne diseases. Furthermore, data presented here illustrate that there the common public narrative around increasing mosquito abundance and geographic expansion under climate change is not universally true.
我们对墨累河315公里沿线的蚊子群落进行了调查，在此过程中，我们识别出了三种组合（上游、中游和下游），它们在20年的时间里呈现出不同的物种丰富度和多样性模式。在下游地区（即纬度更靠南的地方），物种丰富度和群落多样性随时间下降，而中游和上游地区均无显著变化。虽然常见的携带病原体的蚊子（双翅目：蚊科）物种——康氏伊蚊（Aedes camptorhynchus Thomson）的总体平均丰度在下游河流有所增加，但在上游河流却有所下降。这些结果为墨累河附近蚊子群落的多样性和丰度提供了重要信息，并突出了在评估蚊媒疾病风险时考虑空间和时间变化的重要性。此外，此处呈现的数据表明，气候变化下蚊子数量增加和地理范围扩大这一常见的公众说法并非普遍成立。
