Hosts or habitats: What drives the spatial distribution of mosquitoes?
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abstract
Understanding the factors that influence the distribution of vectors is critical to assess the risk of disease transmission across landscapes. For mosquitoes, existing spatial models use only habitat elements (hydrologic and floristic) to predict the distribution of disease vectors within the landscape, ignoring the potential importance of the distribution of hosts.We tested the hypothesis that the distribution of hosts would better explain the spatial distribution of mosquitoes than habitat variables using Information Theory and Poisson Regression. We analyzed the abundance of ectotherm-biting mosquitoes and their hosts from 37 points over a 28-km2 area in Tuskegee National Forest, Alabama, USA. We compared models built using information regarding habitat, hosts, or both for their ability to explain the abundance of Culex peccator and Culex territans, two mosquito species that specialize on reptiles and amphibians. Models built using both host and habitat information were the best models for both species, suggesting that information regarding the distribution of mosquito hosts greatly improves models of mosquito distributions. Moreover, when differences in habitat makeup among stations were accounted for, mosquitoes were found to be significantly more abundant at locations with greater host abundance. Since most mosquitoes feed on only a limited range of hosts and successful blood feeding is one of the most crucial bottlenecks in the life cycle of mosquitoes, it follows that mosquitoes would aggregate in areas of greatest host density. Habitat influences the availability of suitable larval development sites, and to some extent, distribution of hosts. Our analysis, however, shows that within the landscape the distribution of host animals is a crucial factor in determining the spatial distribution of vectors. This has clear and important implications for determining which areas are at a greater risk for zoonotic arboviruses and is a potentially transformative paradigm for understanding the factors that influence the spatial distribution of disease vectors. 2013 Burkett-Cadena et al.
