Mosquito Communities Vary across Landscape and Vertical Strata in Indian River County, Florida

Bryan V Giordano,Daniel W Pérez-Ramos,Yasmin Tavares,Martina M Ramos,Anthony Cruz,Eric P Caragata

doi:10.3390/pathogens10121575

Bryan V Giordano, Daniel W Pérez-Ramos + Show 4 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.3390/pathogens10121575

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Abstract

Mosquito and arbovirus surveillance is essential to the protection of public health. A majority of surveys are undertaken at ground level. However, mosquitoes shelter, breed, and quest for hosts across vertical strata, thus limiting our ability to fully describe mosquito and arboviral communities. To elucidate patterns of mosquito vertical stratification, canopy traps were constructed to sample mosquitoes at heights of 1.5, 5.0, and 8.7 m across three different landscape types in a Florida coastal conservation area. We assessed trapping efforts using individual-based rarefaction and extrapolation. The effects of height, landscape, site location, and sampling date on mosquito community composition were parsed out using permutational ANOVA on a Hellinger-transformed Bray–Curtis dissimilarity abundance matrix. Lastly, a generalized linear mixed effects model (GLMM) was used to explore species-specific vertical patterns. We observed differences in sampling effort and community composition structure across various heights and landscapes. Our GLMM revealed significant effects of trap height for Aedes taeniorhynchus, Anopheles crucians, Anopheles quadrimaculatus, and Culex coronator, but not for Culex nigripalpus, the ultra-dominant species present in this area. Together these data provide evidence that height and landscape significantly affect mosquito community structures and highlight a need to develop sampling regimes to target specific vector and nuisance species at their preferred height and across different landscape types.

Highlights

Robust estimates of mosquito population density and arthropod-borne virus transmission rates are essential in informing mitigation efforts and public health messaging campaigns
The most abundant taxon across all groups, showed no affinity for height; 1.5 m traps accounted for 35.3% of C. nigripalpus collections while the 5.0 m and 8.2 m traps accounted for 34.1% and 30.5%, respectively
Our results indicate that height is an important driver of trapping success for several vector and nuisance species in Florida including A. taeniorhynchus, A. crucians, A. quadrimaculatus, and C. coronator

Summary

Introduction

Robust estimates of mosquito population density and arthropod-borne virus transmission rates are essential in informing mitigation efforts and public health messaging campaigns. Rudimentary mosquito collection methodologies rely largely on suction traps baited with light or host-emanations (e.g., carbon dioxide, octenol) since they are affordable, easy to deploy, and capture an appreciable diversity of mosquito species [1]. Adult mosquito trapping is commonly performed at or below shoulder height (≤1.5 m). The predominance of ground level mosquito surveillance limits our ability to describe mosquito and arboviral communities across vertical strata, where hosts and vectors are known to congregate [2]. Though canopy surveillance has demonstrated utility [3,4,5,6,7], few programs conduct surveillance beyond ground level, and there are limited data available on height bias and mosquito community composition in these overlooked habitats. Vertical stratification studies in North America have largely been conducted in the northeastern United States and Canada [3,4,5,6,8,9,10,11,12], with few studies conducted in the southern region of the United States [13,14,15,16,17,18], and even fewer in Florida [19,20]

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