Biotic predictors of local mosquito communities

As a group, mosquitoes vary widely with respect to hosts, breeding habitat and vector potential. Understanding the factors which influence the composition of a mosquito community can be important in assessing the risk of disease transmission at a given location. At a forested-wetland study site the potential predictors of mosquito community were examined and correlated with abundances of individual mosquito species. The diversity of hosts, including reptiles, amphibians, birds and mammals, were quantified using visual searches, traps, scat identification, and auditory recognition along five transects radiating one km from the edge of a beaver marsh. Vegetation/habitat type was quantified as well as the percentage of forest-covered land within 100 m of each collecting station. The mosquito community was quantified by collecting mosquitoes from natural and artificial resting sites at 100-m intervals along the five transects. Distance to potential breeding sites and land-cover type were important predictors of the mosquito abundance, together explaining 22% of variation observed in mosquito abundances. Significant interactions occurred between distance to breeding site and land-cover type and between distance to breeding site and percent forest cover. Ongoing work suggests that the degree of habitat homogeneity surrounding collecting sites most likely accounts for the interactive effect observed in our analyses. These findings suggest that mosquitoes do not disperse randomly from breeding sites, but radiate in association with particular habitat types. Using habitat type to predict the mosquito communities could ultimately aid in predicting patterns of transmission of mosquito-borne diseases.