It is well known that certain mosquito species can be adapted to better utilize particular environments when compared to other habitat generalist species. Researchers have worked to characterize mosquito populations in wild habitats, such as woodlands, fields, and the boundaries between these habitat types, known as edges. Because of this, you can get a pretty [...]

Mosquito vector-borne diseases are serious global health threats. Malaria alone claims the lives of about 600,000 people annually. With such high death tolls, controlling vectors and the pathogens that they carry is of critical importance. This is evidenced by this year's Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine going to researchers who developed medications that work to [...]

Next Tuesday, the entire Reiskind lab will be presenting at the North Carolina Mosquito & Vector Control Association conference. We'll be chatting about landscape ecology, population genetics, and dog heartworm disease. While we're gearing up for these presentations, I just wanted to pop in to say that we are officially on Instagram! You can find us @VectorEcology. Follow us for [...]

Last semester, I took a special topics seminar course about the value of implementing evolutionary theory, or, in less flashy terms, the benefits of paying attention to evolution. We discussed classic examples like antibiotic and pesticide resistance, as well as the value of evolutionary insight to fields like conservation biology. Although less of a classical [...]

Mosquitoes use a variety of cues to orient toward and land on potential blood meal hosts. These host attraction mechanisms involve physical cues such as heat and moisture, visual cues for day-feeding mosquitoes, and chemical cues. Carbon dioxide (CO2) is widely acknowledged as an important general host attraction cue, but it is less important for [...]

Last time, I posted about a typical day in the life of summer field work. The field mosquito trap processing includes parity analysis. Parity is defined as the number of times a female has given birth (or in the case of the mosquito, whether she has laid eggs). This gives us some idea as to the age of [...]

It’s July and mosquito field season is in full swing. As an introductory post, I thought it would be fun to show you all my daily field work routine. My day started off around 8:00 am collecting mosquito traps. The afternoon before, I had set up these traps at a mix of suburban and wild sites [...]