Avian Feeding Preferences of Culex pipiens and Culiseta spp. Along an Urban-to-Wild Gradient in Northern Spain
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Mosquitoes (<italic>Diptera</italic>: <italic>Culicidae</italic>) are regarded as annoying biting pests and vectors of disease-causing agents to humans and other vertebrates worldwide. Factors that affect their distribution and host choice are not well understood. Here, we assessed the species abundance, community composition, and feeding patterns of mosquitoes in an urban-to-wild habitat gradient in northern Spain. Adult mosquitoes from four habitats (urban, periurban, rural, and wild) were collected by aspiration from mid-July to mid-September, 2019. Thirteen species were represented among the 268 specimens (132 females and 136 males) trapped, including six new records reported for the first time in the region. <italic>Culex pipiens</italic> was the most abundant species in all habitats except in the wild, where <italic>Culex territans</italic> was dominant. The highest mosquito diversity was recorded in the wild habitat [species richness (S) = 10 and Shannon/Margalef-Diversity Indices (H’/MI = 1.51/1.36)] and the lowest in the urban habitat (S = 3; H’/MI = 0.24/0.41). Blood-engorged specimens (<italic>n</italic> = 65) represented 49.2% of the total female collections. Eighty percent of the blood-meals (<italic>n</italic> = 52) were successfully identified based on cytochrome c oxidase I subunit (COI) DNA barcoding. Nine species of birds were identified in blood meals from the three ecological forms of <italic>Cx. pipiens</italic> (<italic>n</italic> = 48), <italic>Culiseta fumipennis</italic> (<italic>n</italic> = 3), and <italic>Culiseta morsitans</italic> (<italic>n</italic> = 1) collected along the four sampling habitats. Four dominant bird species were recorded in <italic>Cx. pipiens</italic>, i.e., <italic>Parus major</italic> (35.4%), <italic>Turdus merula</italic> (18.7%), <italic>Pica pica</italic> (18.7%), and <italic>Passer domesticus</italic> (10.4%). Despite the availability of dog and human hosts in the sampling sites located in the urban habitat, <italic>Cx. pipiens</italic> seemed to have a preference to feed on birds. <italic>Culiseta fumipennis</italic> blood-meal host records are reported for first time in Europe. These findings on mosquito blood-feeding preferences and habitat community changes will help to better understand vector-host associations and pathogen transmission paths.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".