Assessment of Mosquito Pollination

Mosquito floral visitation and pollination

We often consider mosquitoes through an 'anthropocentric lens' that disregards their interactions with nonhuman and nonpathogenic organisms, even though these interactions can be harnessed for mosquito control. Mosquitoes have been recognized as floral visitors, and pollinators, for more than a century. However, we know relatively little about mosquito-plant interactions, excepting some nutrition and chemical ecology-related topics, compared with mosquito-host interactions, and frequently use flawed methodology when investigating them. Recent work demonstrates mosquitoes use multimodal sensory cues to locate flowers, including ultraviolet visual cues, and we may underestimate mosquito pollination. This review focuses on current knowledge of how mosquitoes locate flowers, floral visitation assay methodology, mosquito pollination, and implications for technologies such as sterile male mosquito release through genetic control programs or Wolbachia infection.

Mosquito Pollination and Sugar Detection Methods: An Overview

The interactions between mosquitoes and plants and, particularly, between mosquitoes and plant sugars from flowers and other structures are often overlooked and are vastly underresearched compared to mosquito-vertebrate or mosquito-pathogen interactions. Given the importance of mosquito nectar-feeding behavior, as well as its impact on vectorial capacity and its implications for vector suppression, a better understanding of mosquito-plant interactions is needed. Direct observation of mosquitoes visiting plants to obtain sugar and other nutrients can be difficult because females may leave flowers to seek a blood meal from the observer, but this can be overcome with the right experimental procedures. This article discusses methods for the detection of sugar in mosquitoes and for assessing mosquito pollination.