The authors, led by Mark Ferguson and Joanne Garrett of the European Centre for Environment and Human Health, point out that the study of urban green spaces, climate change and vector-borne diseases are each mature and substantial research fields. The pairwise interactions among them are at least partly understood. What has been missing, they argue, is sustained attention to the intersection of all three domains simultaneously, precisely the place where the most consequential and least anticipated public health outcomes are likely to emerge. As cities race to plant trees, restore wetlands and build green corridors to cope with a warming climate, the question of who else benefits from that vegetation, and at what cost, has remained largely unexamined.

The health benefits of urban greenery are well documented and typically fall into three broad categories. Restoration covers processes such as stress recovery and mental restoration after cognitive fatigue. Capability building refers to green spaces’ role in facilitating physical activity, from jogging to children’s play. Protection from harms includes the cooling effect of vegetation during heatwaves and the capacity of parks and wetlands to manage stormwater and reduce flood risk. Interventions designed to capture these benefits now take many forms: green and blue infrastructure such as urban green corridors that encourage active travel, social programming including nature-based prescribing in clinical settings, and Nature-based Solutions that tackle multiple environmental, social and economic challenges at once, such as a wetland designed to improve water quality, provide recreation and boost biodiversity.

Into this largely benign picture, the authors introduce an uncomfortable cast of characters. The principal vector-borne diseases emerging in European urban areas include tick-borne infections such as Lyme disease and mosquito-borne infections such as dengue, chikungunya and Zika. Ticks infected with Borrelia, the bacterium responsible for Lyme disease, can travel into new areas on birds, moving from Lyme-endemic rural regions into cities and introducing the pathogen there. Urban green space design and management, including practices such as conservation grazing with livestock, may increase habitat suitability for ticks and their natural hosts, which include rodents, birds and deer. Those changes could facilitate the establishment of urban Lyme disease transmission cycles in places where they have historically been absent.

Mosquitoes present a parallel and arguably more alarming challenge. For diseases spread by invasive Aedes mosquitoes, such as dengue, Zika and chikungunya, the increased humidity and shelter provided by dense vegetation can create ideal resting sites. The same applies to the Culex mosquitoes that carry West Nile virus, which thrive in natural wetlands, container habitats and flooded areas. Coupled with the movement of infected migratory birds, these conditions could allow urban cycles of West Nile virus to become established. The economic stakes are considerable: while uncertainty surrounds future health care burdens under changing climates, the global historic costs of dengue, Zika and chikungunya have been estimated at a mean annual cost of 3.29 billion US dollars, and surveillance of disease-carrying vectors remains a major public health challenge associated with significant costs.

Climate change acts as an accelerant on every one of these dynamics. Beyond the direct health burden of heat and extreme weather, a warming world lengthens transmission seasons, expands the geographic range of vectors, and alters pathogen survival and replication rates. The evidence is already quantifiable. According to figures cited in the article from the 2025 Lancet Countdown report, climate change increased the transmission potential of dengue by Aedes albopictus and Aedes aegypti by 48.5 per cent and 11.6 per cent respectively between the decades of 1951 to 1960 and 2015 to 2024. Those are not projections of a distant future but measurements of a shift that has already occurred within living memory.

The climate is also reshaping how people actually use green spaces, which changes exposure patterns in ways that are difficult to predict. Vegetation growth conditions are shifting, with drought causing increased vegetation stress and forcing designers to rethink which species can survive and continue delivering cooling and other services. Human behaviour is adapting too. A study in Germany identified a temperature threshold of 30 degrees Celsius, above which park visits for activities such as jogging and playing with children declined sharply. A more recent study estimated that high temperature and humidity significantly reduce the recreational value of green spaces. Yet climate change may also push people to use parks during cooler periods of the day, in the mornings and at night, and during milder seasons, potentially shifting human-vector contact into hours and months when mosquitoes and ticks are most active.

It is at this behavioural intersection that the authors pose some of their most provocative questions. Will people still be jogging in green spaces if those spaces are hot, humid, or full of disease-carrying ticks and mosquitoes? Will more people picnic outdoors to escape overheated homes, increasing their vector exposure, particularly under trees where ticks might thrive? And, crucially, can urban green spaces be designed to deliver climate adaptation goals without simultaneously increasing vector presence or human-vector contact? What are the net public health outcomes when the substantial benefits of green spaces are weighed honestly against increased exposure risk? None of these questions currently has a confident answer, and the authors argue that this gap in knowledge is itself a policy risk.

The uncertainty extends deep into the tools that governments use to make decisions. Current limited understanding of the interactions and long-term feedbacks between climate change, biodiversity loss and gain, infection risk and ecosystem services makes it difficult for policymakers to evaluate the trade-offs and co-benefits of interventions aimed at climate adaptation, nature recovery and public health. Economic valuation in this context is only partial: certain health endpoints such as mortality risk are well studied, while the valuation of morbidity remains relatively underdeveloped. Assigning economic value to biodiversity loss or gain is difficult, and although some ecosystem services have been the focus of valuation studies, many cultural and spiritual dimensions of green space remain stubbornly hard to price. The authors call for research using integrated assessment models that link climate, ecological, epidemiological, behavioural and socioeconomic data to predict how environmental change and management interventions influence green space use, biodiversity, vector-borne disease risks and wider societal wellbeing. Systems-thinking approaches, which can capture dynamic processes, feedback loops and unintended consequences while simulating alternative policy and management scenarios, are also gaining visibility as a way to handle this complexity.

Because research takes time to translate into impact, and because empirical data can only reflect present or past states, the authors insist that action cannot wait for perfect evidence. Investments in green spaces are already being made, whether in creating new spaces in housing developments or transforming existing ones through planting and changed service provision. They therefore call for current planning and environmental policies that shape the design, management and development of urban green spaces to be amended now, accepting the unknowns. Concretely, they advocate balanced assessments of multiple risks alongside potential benefits, using Health Impact Assessment and the health components of Environmental Impact Assessment to ensure that green space interventions manage vector-borne disease risk while still creating opportunities for health promotion. They also call for a denser monitoring system of urban green spaces so that problems such as widespread tick infestation can be detected and mitigated swiftly, and they emphasise community participation in green space management to ensure inclusive designs and desired outcomes. The message is ultimately one of urgency rather than alarm: healthy, resilient and biodiverse ecosystems remain fundamental to human health, and the goal is not to abandon urban greening but to plan proactively, so that the parks of a hotter century deliver their benefits without quietly cultivating their costs.

Subject of Research: Interactions between urban green space management, climate change and vector-borne disease risk in public health decision-making

Article Title: Balancing urban green space benefits and vector-borne disease risk under climate change: Critical decision-making for 21st century public health

Article References: Balancing urban green space benefits and vector-borne disease risk under climate change: Critical decision-making for 21st century public health. (n.d.). https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pclm.0001016

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pclm.0001016

Keywords: urban green space, vector-borne disease, climate change, Lyme disease, dengue, ticks, mosquitoes, Nature-based Solutions, public health, Health Impact Assessment, biodiversity, urban planning

The promise of ATSB technology rests on a simple but elegant biological insight: both male and female mosquitoes need regular sugar meals to survive, and they obtain them by feeding on plant nectar. Unlike bed nets and indoor residual spraying, which target mosquitoes when they bite people indoors, sugar baits can intercept mosquitoes at any point in their outdoor activity. The Sarabi bait station combines an attractant mixture that mimics the scent of favored nectar sources with a low concentration of dinotefuran, a neonicotinoid insecticide, at just 0.11 percent of the active ingredient. When a mosquito lands and feeds, the insecticide kills it. Because the dose is embedded in a bait rather than sprayed on walls or soaked into nets, developers hoped the approach would sidestep the resistance problems that have eroded the effectiveness of pyrethroid-based tools across much of sub-Saharan Africa.

The three trials were among the most ambitious evaluations of an outdoor vector control product ever attempted. In each study site, bait stations were mounted on the exterior walls of residential structures at a rate of two per house, and clusters of villages were randomized to receive the intervention or to serve as controls. The meta-analysis combined individual participant data from all three trials, a design that allows investigators to harmonize outcome definitions and reanalyze the evidence at the level of individual children and individual mosquitoes rather than relying on aggregated trial summaries. The primary epidemiological outcome was clinical malaria incidence in children, measured across 6,981 person-years of follow-up. The primary entomological outcome was parity, an indicator of whether dissected female mosquitoes had completed egg-laying cycles, assessed in 19,443 Anopheles mosquitoes.

The headline finding was sobering. When the trial arms were compared directly, there were no statistically significant differences between intervention and control communities in any of the six outcomes examined: clinical malaria incidence, Plasmodium falciparum infection prevalence, and four entomological measures covering dominant vector species parity, abundance, landing rate, and sporozoite positivity, the last being the proportion of mosquitoes carrying the infective stage of the malaria parasite. For a product that had advanced to Phase III testing, the stage at which regulatory and policy decisions are typically informed, the absence of an effect on either human infection or mosquito survival represents a decisive negative result.

Yet the meta-analysis was not without a glimmer of possibility. In a post-hoc analysis, the investigators examined whether the spatial density of bait stations, adjusted for coverage, was related to malaria incidence. Here they found statistically significant evidence of a dose-response relationship: for every increase of 10 bait stations per hectare in spatial density, clinical malaria incidence fell by an estimated 19 percent, with an incidence rate ratio of 0.81 and a 95 percent confidence interval of 0.74 to 0.89, a result with a p-value below 0.001. Crucially, this relationship held only when the bait stations were in good condition, suggesting that damaged or degraded baits may have contributed to the overall null result. The authors are careful to note that threshold spatial densities, the point at which protection might begin, could not be determined from the available data.

This dose-response signal raises a provocative possibility: the trials may have deployed the product at densities too low to interrupt transmission, rather than the technology being inherently ineffective. Two bait stations per residential structure translates into very different spatial densities depending on settlement patterns, house spacing, and land use. In dispersed rural settlements, the effective density of baits across the landscape may fall far below what would be needed to kill a meaningful fraction of the mosquito population. Mosquitoes, after all, must encounter and feed on a bait for the device to work, and if baits are sparse relative to the natural sugar sources scattered across the environment, the probability of lethal encounters may be negligible. The finding suggests that deployment approaches or dosing strategies may exist under which ATSB tools could be efficacious, even if the current trials did not demonstrate them.

The negative result also carries important methodological lessons for the field. The authors highlight recommendations for future cluster-randomized trials of vector control interventions, including comprehensive baseline data collection to identify cluster outliers and sites with differences in vector bionomics, the ecological and behavioral characteristics of local mosquito populations. Malaria vectors are not uniform across Africa: some species bite predominantly outdoors, others indoors; some rest in houses after feeding, others remain outside; some feed on cattle, others exclusively on humans. If trial clusters differ systematically in these traits, the apparent effect of an intervention can be diluted or distorted. The meta-analysis also recommends collecting a limited set of entomological outcomes in all trial clusters to ensure adequately powered and balanced analysis of effects on mosquitoes, rather than concentrating entomological sampling in a subset of sites.

The stakes of this research are considerable. Malaria still kills hundreds of thousands of people each year, most of them young children in sub-Saharan Africa, and progress against the disease has stalled in many endemic countries. The mainstay tools, insecticide-treated bed nets, indoor residual spraying, and, more recently, chemoprevention and vaccines, all share a common limitation: they protect people indoors or through direct drug or vaccine action. Residual transmission, the malaria that persists despite high coverage of these tools, is increasingly attributed to mosquitoes that bite outdoors or early in the evening, behaviors that bed nets cannot address. An effective outdoor killing method has long been viewed as a critical missing piece of the elimination toolkit, which is why the ATSB concept attracted substantial investment and why its Phase III failure matters.

There are also ecological and safety dimensions that shaped the product’s design and will shape any future iterations. Because sugar baits attract non-target insects, including pollinators, developers have worked to restrict access to the bait station and to use insecticides at low concentrations. The dinotefuran dose in the Sarabi station is deliberately minimal, and the bait is contained within a station that mosquitoes must enter to feed. Any scale-up strategy that increases spatial density, as the dose-response analysis might suggest, would need to re-examine these trade-offs carefully, balancing the theoretical gains in mosquito mortality against the environmental footprint of deploying many more insecticide-containing devices per hectare.

For now, the meta-analysis stands as a rigorous, transparent accounting of a promising technology that did not perform as hoped under real-world trial conditions. The pooled dataset, spanning three countries, three vector ecologies, and nearly 20,000 dissected mosquitoes, provides one of the most detailed pictures ever assembled of how an outdoor vector control tool behaves at scale. Whether the 19 percent reduction per 10 bait stations per hectare reflects a genuine biological dose-response or an artifact of residual confounding will require new trials specifically designed to test higher deployment densities. Until then, the study serves as both a cautionary tale about the difficulty of translating laboratory promise into population-level protection and a roadmap for how the next generation of outdoor malaria interventions should be tested.

Subject of Research: Phase III trials and meta-analysis of attractive targeted sugar baits for outdoor malaria vector control in Kenya, Mali, and Zambia

Article Title: Outdoor attractive targeted sugar bait Phase III trials for malaria control in Kenya, Mali, and Zambia: An individual participant data meta-analysis

Article References: Ashton, R. A., McDermott, D. P., Kane, F., Sarrassat, S., Harris, A., Fornadel, C., Wagman, J., Chanda, J., Littrell, M., ter Kuile, F. O., Samuels, A. M., Ochomo, E., Churcher, T. S., Biggs, J., Staedke, S. G., Doumbia, S., Kleinschmidt, I., Yukich, J., & Eisele, T. P. (2026). Outdoor attractive targeted sugar bait Phase III trials for malaria control in Kenya, Mali, and Zambia: An individual participant data meta-analysis. PLOS Global Public Health, 6(10), e0006513. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pgph.0006513

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pgph.0006513

Keywords: malaria, vector control, attractive targeted sugar baits, ATSB, mosquitoes, Anopheles, Plasmodium falciparum, cluster-randomized trials, meta-analysis, Kenya, Mali, Zambia

The central message of the work is not that green spaces are dangerous, but that their effects on vector-borne disease are complex, context-dependent, and likely to shift as the climate changes. Urban greening has become a cornerstone of city planning across the world, promoted for cooling overheated neighborhoods, absorbing stormwater, reducing air pollution, and improving residents’ wellbeing. At the same time, warming temperatures are expanding the geographic range and lengthening the active seasons of several arthropod vectors, including mosquitoes and ticks, in parts of the world where they were previously limited. The Exeter and UK Health Security Agency team contends that these two trends, greening and warming, do not operate in isolation, and that policies designed around one of them should not ignore the others.

Vector-borne diseases, in which pathogens are transmitted to humans by organisms such as mosquitoes, ticks, and other biting arthropods, already account for a large share of the global infectious disease burden. Climate change influences this burden in several ways. Temperature affects the survival, development rate, and biting behavior of vectors, as well as the replication rate of pathogens inside them. Altered rainfall and humidity patterns shape the availability of the standing water that mosquito larvae need and the moisture conditions that ticks require to survive. In urban environments, these relationships are further modified by the built landscape: drainage systems, heat islands, irrigated gardens, and green corridors all create distinctive microhabitats that can either support or suppress vector populations.

Urban green spaces sit at the heart of this interaction. Vegetated areas can provide habitat for wildlife hosts that feed ticks and mosquitoes, hold moisture that favors tick survival, and collect water in tree holes, plant containers, or poorly maintained features that mosquitoes can exploit for breeding. Yet the same spaces can also support natural enemies of vectors, reduce local temperatures in ways that push conditions outside the range some vectors tolerate, and be designed and maintained so that they harbor fewer breeding sites. The researchers emphasize that the net effect of any given green space on disease risk depends on its design, its management, the local vector species present, and the climatic trajectory of the region, which is precisely why they argue for careful, evidence-based consideration rather than blanket assumptions in either direction.

The team’s argument is framed as a call for critical decision-making. They encourage planners, public health authorities, and researchers to consider potential interactions between urban green spaces, vector-borne diseases, and climate change as part of efforts to maximize public health benefits and reduce risks. In practice, this means that when a city evaluates a proposal for new parks, tree planting schemes, wetlands, or green infrastructure, the assessment should extend beyond carbon, heat, and wellbeing outcomes to include the possible consequences for vector ecology. It also means that surveillance of mosquitoes and ticks in urban areas becomes more important as warming shifts which species can establish where, so that any emerging risks can be detected and managed early.

The multidisciplinary composition of the group is itself part of the argument. Questions about how a new urban wetland might change mosquito abundance, or how street trees might alter the microclimate experienced by ticks, cannot be answered by any single discipline. They require ecologists who understand vector and host populations, climatologists who can project local conditions, epidemiologists who can model disease transmission, and public health practitioners who know how interventions are delivered on the ground. By bringing these perspectives together, the researchers aim to move the conversation beyond a simple trade-off narrative, in which green space is either an unqualified good or a hidden hazard, toward a more nuanced framework in which design and management choices determine outcomes.

This nuance matters because the stakes are high on both sides of the ledger. The health benefits of urban vegetation are among the most consistently supported findings in environmental health research, encompassing reduced heat stress during heatwaves, opportunities for physical activity, stress reduction, and improved social cohesion. With heatwaves intensifying and cities warming faster than many surrounding areas because of the urban heat island effect, greening is widely regarded as an essential adaptation strategy. Discouraging greening out of an exaggerated fear of vectors could therefore cause real harm. Conversely, ignoring the ecological consequences of greening could allow conditions favorable to vectors to develop unnoticed, particularly in regions where warming makes previously marginal environments newly suitable for species capable of transmitting pathogens to humans.

The researchers also highlight that climate change acts as an amplifier of uncertainty in this system. As average temperatures rise and extreme weather becomes more frequent, the baseline conditions against which green space effects must be judged are themselves moving. A park that poses little vector concern under today’s climate might behave differently under warmer, wetter, or more drought-prone conditions decades from now. This dynamic character of the risk landscape is a key reason the team points to the twenty-first century as the period in which these decisions will be most consequential, and why they advocate that consideration of these interactions be built into planning processes now rather than retrofitted after problems emerge.

For the United Kingdom specifically, the involvement of the UK Health Security Agency reflects growing institutional attention to the health effects of a changing climate, including the monitoring of vector species whose ranges have been shifting northward in Europe. The agency’s participation alongside academic partners underscores the article’s premise that these questions belong squarely within the remit of public health protection, not only within environmental planning or nature conservation. The work was supported by workshop funding from the Environment and Sustainability Institute at the University of Exeter as part of its Think Tank programme, with additional support acknowledged through the Centre for Net Positive Health and Climate Solutions, funded by UKRI, and through an NIHR Population Health Career Scientist Award. The authors declared no competing interests.

Ultimately, the article in PLOS Climate, titled Balancing urban green space benefits and vector-borne disease risk under climate change: Critical decision-making for 21st century public health, is best read as a roadmap for integrated thinking rather than a warning against greening. Its authors ask decision-makers to hold three realities in view simultaneously: that urban green spaces deliver major and growing public health benefits that cities urgently need in a warming world; that climate change is altering the distribution and behavior of the organisms that transmit vector-borne diseases; and that the design, placement, and management of green infrastructure can influence which of those organisms find suitable habitat in towns and cities. Treating these as separate policy silos, the researchers suggest, risks either under-protecting communities from emerging disease risks or undermining the greening agenda on which urban health so heavily depends. The path they advocate is one of informed, multidisciplinary, and adaptive decision-making, in which surveillance, ecological understanding, and public health goals are combined so that greener cities can also be safer ones.

Subject of Research: Interactions between urban green spaces, vector-borne disease risk, and climate change in public health planning

Article Title: A multidisciplinary group of researchers from the University of Exeter and the UK Health Security Agency encourage consideration of potential interactions between urban green spaces, vector-borne diseases, and climate change

Article References: A multidisciplinary group of researchers from the University of Exeter and the UK Health Security Agency encourage consideration of potential interactions between urban green spaces, vector-borne diseases, and climate change. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: urban green spaces, vector-borne diseases, climate change, public health, mosquitoes, ticks, urban planning, PLOS Climate, University of Exeter, UK Health Security Agency, disease surveillance, urban heat island

The research team, led by Mikel A. González of the SASTI Group in Madrid together with colleagues from the University of Córdoba, the Center for Rickettsiosis and Arthropod Vector-Borne Diseases in La Rioja, Clemson University, and the University of Zaragoza, focused on three summer mountain meadows in La Rioja, a region of northern Spain where transhumance-style grazing still brings cattle to upland pastures during the warm months. The choice of location was deliberate. Livestock grazing exposes animals to arthropods of veterinary importance, particularly in summer, and many fly species affect cattle both directly, through swarming and biting that cause stress and blood loss, and indirectly, by transmitting parasites and pathogens. Severe infestations can depress weight gain and milk yield and, in extreme cases, kill animals. Yet, as the authors note, knowledge of which pest species actually share these high-elevation habitats with grazing cattle remained remarkably thin.

To capture that hidden diversity, the team deployed a combination of sampling techniques rather than relying on any single method. The workhorse of the survey was the suction light trap baited with dry ice, a CDC-style design in which carbon dioxide released from sublimating dry ice mimics the breath of a large mammal and draws in host-seeking flies, which are then pulled into a collection chamber by a small fan. Traps were complemented by hand-netting flies around cattle, with ranchers supervising the collections directly on the animals, and by dipping aquatic habitats for larvae and pupae of species whose immature stages develop in water. This multi-pronged strategy matters because different fly families respond to different cues: some are strongly attracted to light and carbon dioxide, others are best caught in flight around their hosts, and some, such as bot flies, are rarely captured by conventional adult sampling at all.

The results paint a detailed picture of the summer fly fauna. In total, 6,372 specimens were collected, representing at least 53 species in eight dipteran families of veterinary importance. The single most abundant family was the Muscidae, the house fly relatives, with 2,118 specimens, including 14 individuals of the horn fly Haematobia irritans, a notorious blood-feeding pest of cattle that spends nearly its entire adult life clinging to the hides of its hosts. Close behind came the blackflies, family Simuliidae, with 1,843 specimens belonging to at least 10 species, a reminder that these small, hump-backed insects, famous for their painful bites, thrive in the cool running waters that drain mountain landscapes. Biting midges of the family Ceratopogonidae accounted for 1,072 specimens representing 20 species, making them the most species-rich group in the survey, followed by 708 mosquitoes of nine species, 505 horse flies and deer flies of the family Tabanidae spanning at least seven species, and 105 moth flies of the family Psychodidae in two species.

Two rarer finds rounded out the inventory and underscored the value of intensive sampling. Six specimens of the louse fly Hippobosca equina, a winged ectoparasite that scuttles through the hair of large mammals, and a single specimen of the horse stomach bot fly Gasterophilus intestinalis were recorded. The bot fly capture is particularly noteworthy because adult Oestridae are elusive, short-lived insects that do not feed and are almost never attracted to baited traps, so their appearance in a survey of this kind is a genuine stroke of fieldwork luck. Each of these species carries its own veterinary profile, from the mechanical irritation and disease transmission potential of muscids to the voracious blood-feeding of tabanids, which are capable of transmitting pathogens such as anaplasmosis agents between animals during interrupted blood meals.

Beyond the raw counts, the study examined when and where fly activity peaked, using generalized linear models, a flexible statistical framework that can handle the non-normal count data typical of insect surveys. The models indicated that total Diptera abundance varied significantly among sampling periods, among locations, and among the target fly groups. Most taxa peaked in early or midsummer, a seasonal pattern with direct management implications, because it identifies the windows when cattle are most heavily exposed to biting pressure and when vector-borne disease risk, if present, would be expected to climb. The variation among locations also suggests that local habitat features, such as the proximity of streams suitable for blackfly larvae or damp depressions where biting midges breed, shape the composition of the pest community at each pasture, meaning that control strategies may need to be tailored site by site rather than applied uniformly across a region.

A major technical strength of the study lies in its integration of classical morphology with DNA barcoding. Species were identified using traditional anatomical characters, then cross-checked by sequencing the COI gene, cytochrome c oxidase subunit I, the standard molecular marker for animal species identification. The resulting barcode sequences were compared against reference databases in the Barcode of Life Data System, allowing the team to confirm identifications and flag specimens whose morphology alone might have led to ambiguity. This dual approach is especially valuable in groups like blackflies and biting midges, where closely related species can be nearly indistinguishable under a microscope yet differ in their capacity to transmit pathogens such as the viruses responsible for bluetongue and epizootic hemorrhagic disease, both of which are listed among the study’s focal concerns.

To push the taxonomic resolution even further, the researchers carried out phylogenetic analyses for three of the most challenging families: the Muscidae, the Simuliidae, and the Culicidae. Using maximum likelihood methods, a statistical approach that finds the evolutionary tree best explaining the observed DNA sequence variation, and evaluating branch support with measures such as the Shimodaira–Hasegawa-like approximate likelihood ratio test and ultrafast bootstrap values, they reconstructed the relationships among the collected species. The effort generated 55 novel nucleotide sequences corresponding to 16 species, all deposited in GenBank for future researchers to consult. Genetic divergence analyses, computed with the Kimura 2-parameter model commonly used in DNA barcoding, helped delineate species boundaries within the blackfly genus Simulium, a group notorious for cryptic species complexes that can hide distinct vector capacities behind near-identical anatomy.

The practical significance of the work extends well beyond an inventory. By establishing which fly species are present, how abundant they are, and when their populations crest through the grazing season, the study provides the foundational data needed for monitoring and management programs targeting pest and vector flies in European grazing systems. Surveillance programs for diseases such as bluetongue depend on knowing where potential vector species occur and in what numbers, and this survey delivers exactly that information for a habitat type, mountain meadow pasture, that had previously been a blind spot. The findings also give ranchers a scientific basis for timing protective measures, from repellents and ear tags to pasture rotation, around the periods of peak fly activity rather than relying on guesswork.

There is also a broader ecological story here. Mountain pastures are changing under the combined pressures of shifting land use and a warming climate, and the composition of their insect communities is likely to shift in response. Species once confined to lower, warmer elevations may move upslope, bringing with them new biting pressure and new disease transmission risks for livestock that have never encountered them. Baselines like the one now established for La Rioja are the reference points against which such changes will be measured. As the authors emphasize, this is the first comprehensive dataset on the diversity and seasonal dynamics of veterinary flies associated with cattle in the mountain meadows of northeastern Spain, and it transforms a region of anecdotal observation into one of documented, quantified, and genetically verifiable entomological record, ready to support the next generation of livestock health research across Europe’s grazing highlands.

Subject of Research: Diversity and seasonal dynamics of veterinary Diptera in mountain livestock pastures of northeastern Spain

Article Title: Biodiversity of Diptera of veterinary importance in mountain livestock pastures of northeastern Spain

Article References: González, M. A., Bravo-Barriga, D., Oteo, J. A., Adler, P. H., & Ruiz-Arrondo, I. (2026). Biodiversity of Diptera of veterinary importance in mountain livestock pastures of northeastern Spain. Parasites & Vectors. https://doi.org/10.1186/s13071-026-07704-7

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s13071-026-07704-7

Keywords: Diptera, cattle grazing, mountain meadows, COI barcoding, blackflies, biting midges, mosquitoes, horse flies, ectoparasites, vector-borne disease, La Rioja, livestock health

The scale of the viral discovery is striking. Across 23 RNA-seq libraries, the researchers identified 416 viral sequences representing related members of 13 virus families, including Metaviridae, Chuviridae, Xinmoviridae, Flaviviridae, and Rhabdoviridae. Notably, the viromes were dominated not by known human pathogens but by insect-specific viruses, or ISVs, a diverse group of viruses that persist in insect populations without apparently infecting vertebrates. These viruses are increasingly recognized as important players in vector biology: some can modulate the ability of mosquitoes to transmit arboviruses by competing for cellular resources or priming the insect immune system. The Colombian data confirm that ISVs form the backbone of the virome in these hematophagous insects, while also revealing that virome structure is not dictated solely by host species identity—a finding that complicates simple assumptions about virus-vector relationships.

That variability is itself a key message of the study. Two insects of the same species collected from different sites, or even different pools from the same area, could carry markedly different viral assemblages. This extensive virome variability suggests that local ecological conditions—habitat type, available hosts, environmental microbes, and perhaps human land use—shape which viruses persist in vector populations. For surveillance programs, the implication is sobering: sampling a single location or season may give a misleading picture of the viral diversity circulating in a region. Continuous, spatially distributed metatranscriptomic monitoring may be required to track how these communities shift over time, particularly as climate change and urbanization alter the distributions of both vectors and their microbes.

Methodologically, the study relied on RNA sequencing of pooled insect specimens, followed by computational assembly and taxonomic classification of the resulting reads. The researchers confirmed host species identity by assembling partial cytochrome c oxidase subunit I (COI) barcode sequences from each metatranscriptome and comparing them against NCBI and BOLD databases, building maximum likelihood phylogenetic trees to verify assignments. Viral contigs were assigned to families by similarity to known relatives, with metrics such as percent identity, alignment coverage, and e-values documented for each assignment. Bacterial taxa were quantified using transcripts per million (TPM) normalization, allowing the team to distinguish transcriptionally active members of the microbiome from dormant or contaminating DNA. This activity-based view is important because it captures which microbes are actually metabolizing inside the insects, not merely which are present.

The bacterial side of the analysis revealed complex, active microbiomes with clear patterns of ecological structure. Wolbachia, the famous intracellular symbiont capable of blocking arbovirus transmission and manipulating host reproduction, was prominently represented in Culex, Coquillettidia, and Aedes albopictus specimens. Its presence in these genera is consistent with its known distribution, but its transcriptional activity in wild Colombian populations underscores its potential relevance for biocontrol strategies, including the deployment of Wolbachia-infected mosquitoes to suppress diseases such as dengue. The detection of the symbiont across multiple genera and habitat types suggests it is a stable feature of the local vector fauna, providing a natural baseline for future interventions.

Perhaps more surprising was the detection of bacterial genera typically associated with humans, including Cutibacterium, Faecalibacterium, Prevotella, Hallela, and Escherichia, at lower abundances in the insect microbiomes. Their presence, the authors suggest, may reflect exposure to human-impacted environments—urban and peri-urban settings where vectors breed in water contaminated with human waste or feed on human hosts. This finding blurs the boundary between the insect microbiome and the microbial ecology of the surrounding human landscape. It also raises practical questions: if vector microbiomes mirror environmental contamination, they could potentially serve as sentinels for monitoring microbial pollution, while simultaneously acting as vehicles through which human-associated bacteria, and the genes they carry, circulate between environments and arthropod hosts.

That last concern becomes concrete in the study’s resistome findings. The researchers identified transcriptionally active antimicrobial resistance genes (ARGs) conferring resistance to several major antibiotic classes, including fluoroquinolones, aminoglycosides, and tetracyclines, along with instances of multidrug resistance associated with efflux pump systems—cellular machinery that pumps diverse toxic compounds out of bacterial cells. Critically, statistical analysis showed that resistome composition differed significantly among insect species (pseudo-F = 1.91, p = 0.028) but not among habitat categories, indicating that the host’s own microbial community structure, rather than simply the collection site, drives which resistance genes are present and expressed. The genes were detected through TPM-normalized transcript counts, meaning they were not just present as DNA but actively being transcribed by living bacteria within the insects.

Even more consequential was the finding that some ARGs were associated with sequences linked to mobile genetic elements, such as plasmids and transposons, which can move between bacteria through horizontal gene transfer. This suggests that the microbiomes of hematophagous insects could function as arenas where resistance genes are exchanged, reshuffled, and potentially passed between environmental bacteria, human-associated pathogens, and symbionts. The authors are careful to frame this as a hypothesis requiring further work: they call for studies incorporating environmental matrices—soil, water, and other samples from the same sites—and functional validation to determine whether these insects genuinely amplify or disseminate antimicrobial resistance, or merely reflect the resistance burden of their surroundings. Still, the mere demonstration that active ARGs circulate in the microbiomes of mosquitoes and sand flies adds a new dimension to antimicrobial resistance surveillance, which has traditionally focused on clinical settings, livestock, and water systems.

The study also contributes to a growing appreciation of endogenous viral elements, sequences of viral origin integrated into host genomes, as part of the picture of vector viromes. By cataloging viral sequences across multiple families and host species, the dataset provides raw material for distinguishing true infectious viruses from genomic fossils and for understanding how insect viruses and their hosts have co-evolved. Combined with the bacterial and resistome data, the work exemplifies the power of metatranscriptomics as a single-lens approach to vector biology: one sequencing workflow yields simultaneous insight into pathogens, symbionts, environmental microbes, and resistance genes, all filtered through the constraint of transcriptional activity.

For Colombia, a country spanning Caribbean coastlines, Andean valleys, and Amazonian rainforest, the findings carry direct implications for public health planning. The confirmation that vector viromes are dominated by insect-specific viruses is reassuring in one sense, but the extensive variability among pools and sites means that pathogen emergence could be difficult to anticipate from limited sampling. The presence of Wolbachia in key vector species offers a foundation for biocontrol programs already proven elsewhere, while the detection of human-associated bacteria and active resistance genes ties vector surveillance to the broader agenda of antimicrobial resistance monitoring. The authors, led by Daniel F. Largo and Harold D. Gomez Rosero with corresponding authors Rafael J. Vivero-Gómez and Claudia Ximena Moreno-Herrera, emphasize that further studies with environmental sampling and functional validation are needed before the full significance of the resistome findings can be assessed. What is already clear, however, is that the microbes inhabiting these disease vectors form a dynamic, interconnected ecosystem—one that reflects the environments humans have built and may, in turn, shape the health risks those environments carry back to us.

Subject of Research: Virome, microbiome, and antimicrobial resistance gene profiles of mosquitoes and sand flies in Colombia

Article Title: Metatranscriptomic insights into mosquitoes and sand flies from Colombia reveal extensive virome variability and detection of bacterial and viral-related resistomes

Article References: Largo, D. F., Gomez Rosero, H. D., Gómez, G. F., Junca, H., Cadavid-Restrepo, G. E., Vivero-Gómez, R. J., & Moreno-Herrera, C. X. (2026). Metatranscriptomic insights into mosquitoes and sand flies from Colombia reveal extensive virome variability and detection of bacterial and viral-related resistomes. Parasites & Vectors. https://doi.org/10.1186/s13071-026-07710-9

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s13071-026-07710-9

Keywords: mosquitoes, sand flies, virome, metatranscriptomics, insect-specific viruses, Wolbachia, antimicrobial resistance, resistome, microbiome, Colombia, RNA-seq, horizontal gene transfer

At the heart of the review is the idea that host seeking unfolds through overlapping phases: activation, orientation, approach, landing, probing, and feeding. Each phase depends on different cues with different reliability. Carbon dioxide exhaled by a vertebrate is a long-range signal that can activate a hungry female from tens of meters away, but it is not host-specific, since any breathing animal produces it. Skin odors carry the identity of a particular host but operate at shorter ranges. Heat and humidity become informative only at close quarters, and visual cues dominate in bright conditions. Because no single cue suffices across the entire journey, mosquitoes must stitch together fragments of information, and the authors emphasize that internal states such as hunger, mating status, and egg-development stage, along with learned associations, bridge the temporal gaps between cues encountered at different moments.

To explain how this stitching happens, the review outlines three sensory architectures that can contribute to host recognition. The first is feedforward multisensory integration, in which signals from different modalities converge in higher brain centers such as the antennal lobe, the lateral horn, and the mushroom body, producing a combined representation of the host. The second is cross-modal gating, in which one sensory channel modulates the sensitivity of another; the classic example is the way carbon dioxide primes the olfactory system to respond more strongly to skin odors. The third, and arguably the most conceptually important, is closed sensorimotor feedback: a mosquito’s own movements change the sensory input it encounters next, so flying upwind toward a plume, casting sideways when the plume is lost, and steering during landing are all acts of active sensing. The insect is not a passive receiver of stimuli but an agent that structures its own perceptual world through action.

This active-sensing perspective carries a technical implication that the authors highlight: host seeking cannot be fully understood by presenting mosquitoes with fixed stimuli in a wind tunnel and recording their choices. Behavior unfolds over seconds to minutes within a single host-seeking bout, and the trajectory of the insect determines which cues it samples and in what order. Sensorimotor dynamics therefore create a loop in which perception guides movement and movement reshapes perception. The review argues that future experiments should be designed to probe this loop directly, for example by tracking how mosquitoes modulate their flight patterns to resolve ambiguous plumes or how they adjust probing behavior on the skin in response to the thermal and chemical feedback they receive from each attempt.

The synthesis also examines how infection changes the picture. Pathogens such as dengue virus, Zika virus, and West Nile virus can modify the host-derived sensory signals that a mosquito encounters, and they can also alter the mosquito’s own responsiveness, probing behavior, feeding persistence, locomotion, and neuromodulation. The authors are careful to grade the evidence. Studies showing that infected hosts or infected mosquitoes differ in relevant traits provide association. Experiments that causally manipulate the pathogen or the mosquito’s physiology establish modulation. Only in a smaller subset of systems do the observed patterns fit what would be expected of adaptive manipulation, in which the pathogen benefits specifically from increased transmission. This tiered framing matters because claims of manipulation are easy to overstate, and the review provides a vocabulary for distinguishing strong from weak inference.

One of the most consequential findings the review consolidates is that infection can reshape the odor landscape itself. Work on dengue and Zika, for instance, has shown that infection can change the volatile chemicals emitted by host skin, making infected individuals more attractive to mosquitoes in ways that plausibly enhance transmission. Conversely, the mosquito’s own infection status can alter how its nervous system processes those cues. Because the extrinsic incubation period, the time a pathogen needs to become transmissible, must align with the mosquito’s blood-feeding schedule, even modest infection-associated shifts in host-seeking or feeding behavior can have disproportionate effects on epidemiological outcomes. The review stresses that these behavioral changes occur on timescales of seconds to minutes within a feeding bout, while transmission emerges over much longer timescales, and connecting the two levels remains an open challenge.

Redundancy emerges as a recurring theme with direct practical consequences. Because host recognition is multimodal, knocking out a single sensory pathway often fails to abolish host seeking. Mosquitoes with impaired carbon dioxide detection can still locate hosts using skin odors and heat; disrupting one family of odorant receptors does not silence the ionotropic receptor channel or the trigeminal-like pathways that detect thermal and humidity cues. This sensory compensation explains why many laboratory interventions, including repellents such as DEET and IR3535 and genetic manipulations of receptor co-receptors such as Orco, show reduced or context-dependent performance in the field. The review argues that intervention studies should evaluate whole-animal phenotypes and mosquito-human contact rates, not just responses at the receptor level, because the intact animal can route around a blocked pathway.

Ecological context is the second major caveat the authors raise for control strategies. Field studies consistently show that the effectiveness of attractant-baited traps, spatial repellents, and odor-based interventions depends on the local environment, the composition of competing host odors, wind conditions, and the species and physiological state of the local mosquito population. A lure that outperforms a human in a semi-field enclosure may fail in a village where natural host cues are abundant and varied. The review therefore proposes a tiered evaluation framework spanning receptor-level mechanisms, whole-animal behavior, effects on mosquito-human contact, and ultimately transmission or disease endpoints, and it warns that laboratory results should not be extrapolated to field performance without explicit testing across contexts.

The microbiome adds yet another layer of complexity. Skin microbiota shape the volatile profile that makes one human more attractive to mosquitoes than another, and the mosquito’s own microbial community can influence its olfactory sensitivity and feeding behavior. The review integrates this evidence into the multimodal framework, suggesting that microbiome-mediated variation in host odors and vector competence represents a modifiable component of the transmission cycle. Combined with the growing recognition that learning allows mosquitoes to adjust their host preferences based on experience, the picture that emerges is of a vector whose host-seeking behavior is plastic at multiple levels: neural, microbial, and experiential.

The review closes by generating testable predictions for active sensing, sensory compensation, infection-associated modulation, and the persistence of intervention effects across laboratory and field settings, and it identifies unresolved sites of neural convergence in the mosquito brain as priorities for future research. For a field in which mosquito-borne diseases such as malaria, dengue, and West Nile fever continue to impose enormous burdens, the message is clear: durable transmission control will come not from blocking a single cue but from understanding the full sensorimotor loop that connects a flying insect to its next blood meal. By mapping that loop, from plume-following flight to the final probing of the skin, and by specifying where pathogens intervene within it, the authors offer both a conceptual framework and a practical roadmap for the next generation of vector-control research.

Subject of Research: Multimodal sensory integration and active sensing in mosquito host recognition and its implications for pathogen transmission control

Article Title: Multimodal host recognition in mosquitoes: sensory integration, active sensing, and transmission control

Article References: Liu, Z., Shu, Z., Bai, Y., Zhang, T., Shi, H., Zhang, D., Liu, G., & Jin, Y. (2026). Multimodal host recognition in mosquitoes: sensory integration, active sensing, and transmission control. Parasites & Vectors. https://doi.org/10.1186/s13071-026-07702-9

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s13071-026-07702-9

Keywords: mosquitoes, host seeking, multisensory integration, active sensing, carbon dioxide, odorant receptors, dengue virus, Zika virus, West Nile virus, pathogen-vector interactions, vector control, sensory neurobiology

The research team, led by Diana G. Argaez-Sierra and colleagues at the Universidad Autónoma de Yucatán’s Arbovirology Laboratory, set out to inventory the mosquito fauna of a reserve that had received surprisingly little focused entomological attention despite its ecological prominence. The Ría Celestún Biosphere Reserve is one of the largest of Yucatán’s twelve protected natural areas, encompassing roughly 81,482 hectares of mangroves, coastal dune vegetation, salt marshes, petenes, and lowland floodplain forest on the Gulf of Mexico. The region’s warm, semi-arid climate brings about 767 millimeters of annual rainfall, with relative humidity ranging from 65 to 95 percent and maximum monthly temperatures climbing to 40 degrees Celsius—a combination that creates ideal conditions for mosquito breeding across a mosaic of brackish and freshwater habitats.

Sampling took place during the rainy season in October and November 2024, when the researchers deployed a cross-sectional design across 27 sites representing seven distinct habitat types, including mangrove swamp, salt flats, water surge zones, the bird-nesting islet known as Isla de los Pájaros, coastal scrub, disturbed vegetation, and coastal halophytic vegetation. Working from 19:00 to 22:00 and again from 05:00 to 08:00, the team used two backpack-mounted Prokopack aspirators per night to vacuum adult mosquitoes directly from shaded areas and dense vegetation. They supplemented this active collection with BG-Sentinel traps baited with synthetic human-scent attractant, five traps per site running overnight. Captured insects were immediately preserved in liquid nitrogen and transported to the laboratory, where stereomicroscopes and standard taxonomic keys were used to identify species morphologically.

The results were dominated by a single, familiar face. Of the 3,755 adult mosquitoes captured, females of Aedes taeniorhynchus—the black salt-marsh mosquito—accounted for 95.26 percent of the entire collection and turned up in every habitat sampled. This species is famously associated with coastal wetlands and mangroves throughout the Americas, ovipositing in brackish-water environments and displaying a remarkable tolerance for salinity that few other mosquitoes can match. Its larvae can even colonize artificial containers, allowing the insect to bridge wild and human-modified landscapes. While Ae. taeniorhynchus is primarily a biting nuisance in much of its range, its epidemiological resume is sobering: Venezuelan equine encephalitis virus has been isolated from this species in Guatemala and Costa Rica, eastern equine encephalitis virus in South Carolina, and the Itaqui virus, which causes fever and headache in humans, in Venezuela.

The headline discovery of the survey, however, was Anopheles gabaldoni, a mosquito first described in Tabasco, Mexico in 1941 and subsequently reported in Veracruz and Chiapas, as well as in the neighboring Yucatán Peninsula states of Campeche and Quintana Roo. Its capture in the disturbed vegetation area and on Isla de los Pájaros marks the first record for Yucatán state, raising the state’s documented mosquito tally to 60 species. The identification rests on distinctive abdominal morphology—tufts of posterolateral scales on the tergites and numerous light and dark scales on the sternites—features that the team documented photographically. Intriguingly, all Anopheles species in the study except An. vestitipennis were collected on the islet, including An. albimanus, An. crucians, An. punctipennis, and An. pseudopunctipennis, suggesting that this mangrove-covered bird sanctuary functions as an anopheline hotspot within the reserve.

Habitat type proved to be a strong predictor of mosquito diversity. The disturbed vegetation area yielded the richest assemblage with 12 species, followed by Isla de los Pájaros and the floodable area with seven species each. Although forest modification is generally associated with reduced species diversity, the authors propose that the convergence of disturbed vegetation and highly conserved mangrove may actually amplify mosquito richness by creating edge habitats that satisfy the breeding requirements of multiple species simultaneously. Six of the 27 sampling sites produced no mosquitoes at all, including two sites in the saltworks and three on the islet, underscoring how patchy mosquito distributions can be even within favorable landscapes.

Because morphology alone can mislead—Coquillettidia venezuelensis resembles Cq. nigricans, Anopheles vestitipennis resembles An. neivai, and species of the Aedes subgenus Ochlerotatus are notoriously similar—the team turned to DNA barcoding to confirm the identities of three species. Using the Folmer primers LCO1490 and HC02198, they amplified roughly 700-base-pair fragments of the mitochondrial cytochrome c oxidase subunit I gene. The 704-base-pair COI sequence of An. vestitipennis showed 99.56 percent nucleotide identity with reference sequences in GenBank, and the 687-base-pair sequence of Cq. venezuelensis reached 99.85 percent identity. For Ae. angustivittatus, the 707-base-pair COI sequence showed 98.50 percent identity with a specimen from neighboring Quintana Roo, and a complementary 377-base-pair fragment of the nuclear ITS2 region was also generated. All sequences were deposited in GenBank under accession numbers PZ154394, PZ154395, PZ154396, and PZ158059, adding a permanent molecular reference resource for future mosquito work in the region.

The phylogenetic analysis added a tantalizing evolutionary twist. Bayesian inference conducted in MrBayes, using a 46-sequence dataset of 579 nucleotide positions and Culex quinquefasciatus as an outgroup, revealed that the Celestún Ae. angustivittatus forms a strongly supported lineage with the Quintana Roo specimen, with 98 percent posterior support. But when the researchers calculated pairwise genetic distances, the Yucatán sequences diverged by 3.11 to 4.15 percent from Ae. angustivittatus collected in Chiapas, the State of Mexico, Colombia, and Ecuador. Divergence values in the 3 percent range are often taken as evidence of distinct evolutionary lineages in mosquito DNA barcoding, and the authors suggest that what is currently called Ae. angustivittatus may actually comprise multiple species or distinct subpopulations across its range. They ruled out confusion with the closely related Aedes infirmatus, since interspecific divergence between the two species measured only 2.76 to 2.77 percent, and they note that the ITS2 marker was of limited use here because public databases contain too few ITS2 sequences from closely related Aedes species. Resolving the question will require broader sampling, diagnostic morphological comparisons, and potentially complete mitochondrial genome analysis.

The public health stakes of the inventory are considerable. The Ría Celestún Biosphere Reserve has previously yielded Cache Valley and South River viruses and alphavirus RNA from Ae. taeniorhynchus, alphavirus RNA from An. pseudopunctipennis and An. crucians, and St. Louis encephalitis virus isolated from the bird Cyanocorax yncas. Females of Ae. taeniorhynchus captured at the Mérida zoo tested positive for Cache Valley and Kairi viruses, both of which primarily infect livestock and wildlife but can incidentally infect humans. In Colombian mangrove forests, RNA from St. Louis encephalitis, yellow fever, dengue, Venezuelan equine encephalitis, and West Nile viruses has been detected in mosquitoes, and Venezuelan equine encephalitis virus and St. Louis encephalitis virus have been found in Mansonia titillans—one of the eight species newly recorded at Celestún. With the reserve attracting heavy tourism and hosting dense communities of birds and mammals, the presence of competent vector species creates precisely the ecological conditions under which zoonotic arboviruses can circulate undetected until they spill over into human populations.

Methodologically, the study also delivered a practical lesson for surveillance design: the backpack aspirator captured 94.70 percent of all mosquitoes across 15 species, while the BG-Sentinel traps, which excel at collecting human-biting species like Ae. aegypti, accounted for just 5.30 percent across nine species. For rare species such as Ae. angustivittatus, An. vestitipennis, Cq. venezuelensis, and Ma. titillans, both methods contributed in similar proportions, suggesting that combining techniques remains essential for a complete picture of diversity. The authors are candid about the limitations of a single wet-season pass through the reserve; each site was inspected only once, and dry-season sampling will be needed to capture seasonal shifts in species composition. They also call for intensified arbovirus testing on Isla de los Pájaros, whose hundreds of nesting pelicans, herons, frigatebirds, and cormorants make it a natural laboratory for understanding how mosquitoes, birds, and viruses interact in one of the Yucatán’s most ecologically vital corners. With 24 species now documented across the reserve—40 percent of Yucatán state’s entire mosquito fauna—Celestún has firmly established itself as a frontier for entomological discovery on Mexico’s Gulf coast.

Subject of Research: Mosquito species inventory and DNA barcoding in a Mexican mangrove biosphere reserve

Article Title: Mosquito fauna (Diptera: Culicidae) in the Ria Celestún Biosphere Reserve (RCBR) with a new record for Yucatán, México

Article References: Argaez-Sierra, D. G., Cigarroa-Toledo, N., Baak-Baak, C. M., Tzuc-Dzul, J. C., Cetina-Trejo, R. C., Talavera-Aguilar, L. G., Chi-Chim, W. A., Arana-Guardia, R., & García-Rejón, J. E. (2026). Mosquito fauna (Diptera: Culicidae) in the Ria Celestún Biosphere Reserve (RCBR) with a new record for Yucatán, México. Discover Animals, 3(1), Article 93. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44338-026-00253-4

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44338-026-00253-4

Keywords: mosquitoes, Culicidae, Anopheles gabaldoni, Ría Celestún Biosphere Reserve, Yucatán, DNA barcoding, COI gene, arboviruses, Aedes taeniorhynchus, mangroves, biodiversity, vector surveillance

The research team, led by Cecília Ferreira de Mello and Jeronimo Alencar of the Oswaldo Cruz Foundation, worked at Terra Boa Farm in the municipality of Silva Jardim, a roughly three-hectare agroecological plot where açaí palms and peach palms are cultivated alongside native trees. Between June 2022 and December 2025, the team carried out 43 monthly sampling events totaling 86 hours of collection effort. Rather than focusing on a single habitat type, as most previous studies have done, they systematically sampled five distinct larval environments: three natural ones, namely bromeliads, bamboo internodes, and fallen peach palm leaf bracts, and two artificial ones, a plastic tarp laid on the ground where rainwater pooled in its depressions, and a 200-liter polyethylene water barrel. None of these habitats were introduced by the researchers; they were all features already present in the working farm.

In total, the team collected 5,314 immature mosquitoes. The genus Culex dominated numerically, accounting for 53.8 percent of all specimens, followed by Limatus at 16.6 percent and Wyeomyia at 16.2 percent. Just five species, Culex iridescens, Culex pleuristriatus, Limatus durhamii, Wyeomyia edwardsi, and the Asian tiger mosquito Aedes albopictus, together made up nearly 80 percent of everything captured. The statistical analysis, which included individual-based species accumulation curves computed with rarefaction and extrapolation methods, bipartite interaction networks linking each species to each habitat, and cluster analysis based on Jaccard dissimilarity, revealed a community structured far more tightly than chance alone would predict. Each habitat type hosted a recognizable assemblage of specialists, a pattern ecologists describe as niche partitioning.

The natural habitats overwhelmingly won the diversity contest. Bromeliads, bamboo internodes, and peach palm bracts together yielded 4,175 specimens, or 78.6 percent of the total, and supported 34 of the 38 recorded species. Twenty-six species occurred exclusively in natural habitats. Bromeliads alone produced 2,031 individuals from 22 species, with the specialists Cx. pleuristriatus and Wy. edwardsi making up more than four-fifths of the bromeliad catch. Bamboo internodes, dominated by Cx. iridescens at 72.4 percent of their fauna, supported 21 species and even harbored predatory larvae of Toxorhynchites trichopygus, a genus whose adults do not bite and whose larvae may help regulate populations of other mosquitoes by preying on them. The species accumulation curves for natural habitats did not reach an asymptote, hinting that the true richness of these phytotelmata, particularly in the unsampled forest canopy, is likely even higher.

The artificial habitats told a very different story. The plastic tarp and the water barrel together accounted for 1,139 specimens but only 12 species, just four of which were exclusive to artificial containers. The water barrel was nearly barren, yielding a mere 22 individuals of six species, with Aedes albopictus making up almost two-thirds of them. The tarp, by contrast, was a productive breeding ground, hosting 1,117 specimens from nine species, dominated by Li. durhamii and Ae. albopictus, which together represented 83.7 percent of its mosquito fauna. Perhaps most striking was the consistent presence of Culex quinquefasciatus, the southern house mosquito, a species typically confined to urban and heavily degraded environments, breeding in plastic tarps embedded within a farm surrounded by preserved forest. The authors interpret this as evidence of increased ecological plasticity under agroforestry management conditions.

The epidemiological implications are where the study becomes genuinely alarming for public health. Among the species recorded were Haemagogus leucocelaenus and Haemagogus janthinomys, the primary vectors of sylvatic yellow fever virus in the Americas, colonizing bamboo stands within the farm. The team also documented Sabethes identicus, a rarely recorded species considered a secondary yellow fever vector. Brazil experienced a major yellow fever outbreak between 2016 and 2018 driven by these very mosquito genera, and the presence of their larvae in an agricultural landscape adjacent to protected areas such as the Poço das Antas ecological reserve suggests that agroforests could serve as staging grounds where sylvatic vectors and farmworkers come into close contact.

Then there is Aedes albopictus, the Asian tiger mosquito, which emerged as the study’s great generalist. It was the only species detected in all five habitat types, thriving equally in natural bromeliads and bamboo, in ephemeral peach palm bracts, and in human-made tarps and barrels. This versatility matters because Ae. albopictus is a recognized bridge vector, capable of moving pathogens between sylvatic transmission cycles in wildlife and urban cycles in human populations. Recent laboratory work has demonstrated its competence for yellow fever virus, raising concerns about possible reemergence of urban yellow fever in Brazil. A mosquito that breeds in both the forest and the farmyard, and that readily bites humans, represents precisely the kind of conduit through which arbovirus spillover could occur.

The cluster analysis of species composition added a layer of ecological nuance. Bromeliads and bamboo internodes, both stable, long-lasting natural phytotelmata, hosted the most similar communities, as did peach palm bracts and the plastic tarp, both of which are relatively ephemeral, sun-exposed pools. The water barrel stood apart from everything else, hosting the most distinct assemblage. This pattern indicates that oviposition site selection by gravid female mosquitoes is far from random: it is governed by water chemistry, shading, container geometry, and chemical cues, with each habitat type acting as an environmental filter that sorts the regional species pool into distinct local communities.

Importantly, the authors are not arguing against agroforestry. These systems are widely promoted as sustainable alternatives to deforestation and monoculture, reconciling agricultural production with biodiversity conservation, and the sheer diversity of mosquitoes recorded at Terra Boa Farm, including many specialized, non-vector species, underscores their ecological value. Instead, the researchers propose practical management measures that farmers can adopt without destroying the natural habitats that sustain predators and specialists. Unused plastic tarps should be inspected, rolled up, or properly disposed of after rainfall to eliminate breeding sites for Ae. albopictus and Cx. quinquefasciatus. Water storage barrels should be tightly sealed or fitted with fine mesh screens. Meanwhile, bromeliads and bamboo internodes should be left intact, because they support natural enemies such as Toxorhynchites larvae and specialized non-vector species that contribute to ecosystem stability and may competitively displace vector taxa.

The study also lays out a clear agenda for future research. Because the current work assessed larval communities rather than adult infection status, the authors call for molecular screening of mosquitoes for arboviruses and longitudinal studies of vector-host contact at the forest-agriculture interface. Such work would move beyond theoretical assessments of vector potential and allow direct measurement of pathogen spillover risk. As agroforestry expands across the Atlantic Forest as a policy tool for ecological restoration and income generation, understanding these landscapes as eco-epidemiological interfaces, where sylvatic pathogen cycles, vectors, domestic animals, and agricultural workers converge, will be essential for balancing the conservation benefits of sustainable farming against the public health risks that come with bringing forest and humanity closer together.

Subject of Research: Mosquito community structure in natural and artificial larval habitats within an Atlantic Forest agroforestry system in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

Article Title: Phytotelm and anthropogenic mosquitoes: community structure in natural and artificial habitats in an Atlantic Forest agroforestry system, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

Article References: de Mello, C. F., Müller, G. A., de Alcantara Azevedo, W. T., Gil-Santana, H. R., Araújo, T. R., Pimentel, R., & Alencar, J. (2026). Phytotelm and anthropogenic mosquitoes: community structure in natural and artificial habitats in an Atlantic Forest agroforestry system, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. The Science of Nature, 113(5), Article 113. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00114-026-02162-8

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s00114-026-02162-8

Keywords: mosquitoes, Culicidae, phytotelmata, agroforestry, Atlantic Forest, Aedes albopictus, Haemagogus, yellow fever, arbovirus spillover, larval habitats, bromeliads, vector surveillance