Controversies over the scientific name of the principal mosquito vector of yellow fever virus - expediency versus validity.

Alan N Clements,Ralph E Harbach

doi:10.1111/jvec.12277

Abstract

The history of the scientific name of the yellow fever mosquito, the vector of yellow fever virus, ranges from 1757 to the early twenty-first century. In his 1757 work Iter Palaestinum, Frederic Hasselquist gave the name Culex aegypti to a mosquito species responsible for fierce attacks on humans in Egypt. That name was never later ascribed to Hasselquist as author, but to Linnaeus, although the name never appeared in any of Linnaeus' publications. In Cuba, at the end of the nineteenth century, the vector of the unknown infectious agent of yellow fever was first identified as Culex mosquito and later more validly named Stegomyia fasciata. Mosquito taxonomists differed strongly about the name of the mosquito through much of the twentieth century. Interventions by the International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature imposed a biologically invalid specific name, and in the early twenty-first century a phylogenetic analysis of the culicid tribe Aedini restored the genus Stegomyia from a century earlier. That action was short-lived. A phylogenetic reassessment resulted in the return of Stegomyia to subgeneric rank in Aedes; thus, the name of the yellow fever mosquito survives in the traditional classification of convenience as the trinomial Aedes (Stegomyia) aegypti (Linnaeus).

Highlights

(2) In his Introduction to Iter Palæstinum (Hasselquist 1757), Linnaeus stated that the names of animals and plants that he had introduced to that work would be found in the 10th (1758) edition of Systema Naturae
Close examination of the pinned specimen and the dissected genitalia revealed that they matched Huang’s (1979) description of Aedes (Stegomyia) aegypti (Linnaeus) in the Oriental Region. This was consistent with Gough’s (1914) conclusion that the yellow fever mosquito does not have the characteristics of the mosquito originally given the specific name of Culex aegypti
Second and solicited intervention In an application to the International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature, Mattingly et al (1962) argued that substitution of the specific name aegypti Linnaeus by another name would cause serious and widespread confusion. They suggested that the Commission use its plenary powers (1) to validate the specific name aegypti Linnaeus, 1762, as used in the combination Culex aegypti and (2) to direct that the validated name be interpreted by reference to a selected neotype specimen, which would be a specimen of the yellow fever mosquito from “Kuala Lumpur, Selangor, Malaya.”

Summary

INTRODUCTION

Comparison of the formal descriptions of insect species in Hasselquist’s 1757 Iter Palæstinum with those in Linnaeus’ 1758 10th edition of Systema Naturae reveals that Hasselquist provided much greater anatomical detail than Linnaeus. (2) In his Introduction to Iter Palæstinum (Hasselquist 1757), Linnaeus stated that the names of animals and plants that he had introduced to that work would be found in the 10th (1758) edition of Systema Naturae. The year 1762 suggests that Sherborn knew that a code of zoological nomenclature published after 1878 had arbitrarily fixed 1 January 1758 as the date of the starting point of zoological nomenclature (Section 4.1) (Melville 1995), but why Sherborn listed Linnaeus as author of the species named Culex aegypti is not known. The Diarium Surinamicum was published many years later (Rolander 2008), in English translation, as a part of Volume 3 of The Linnaeus Apostles: Global Science and Adventure (Hansen 2008)

Naming of the mosquito vector

Interventions by the International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature

Phenetic and phylogenetic classifications of aedine mosquitoes