Aedes albopictus (Skuse, 1895)

Azari-Hamidian, Shahyad, Norouzi, Behzad, Maleki, Hannaneh, Rezvani, Seyed Mahmoud, Pourgholami, Morteza & Oshaghi, Mohammad Ali, 2024, First record of a medically important vector, the Asian tiger mosquito Aedes albopictus (Skuse, 1895) (Diptera: Culicidae), using morphological and molecular data in northern Iran, Journal of Insect Biodiversity and Systematics 10 (4), pp. 953-963 : 955-958

Aedes albopictus (Skuse, 1895)

Material examined. In total, 29 larvae, were reared from the eggs, and 1529 adult specimens were collected. Among them, 29 larvae and 896 adult specimens were caught which were not recognized as a species previously known to occur in the province. They were captured using manual aspirators (886 specimens), BG lure traps (10 specimens) and ovitraps during August–November 2023. The aggressive biter mosquito species was morphologically identified as A. albopictus ( Figs 2 and 3). This species was collected in 14 counties of the province, out of 17 ( Fig. 1).

Other species, which were collected with A. albopictus by hand catches, were: A. caspius (Pallas, 1771) s.l. (4 females), A. cinereus Meigen, 1818 (94 females), A. vexans (Meigen, 1830) (312 females), Coquillettidia richiardii (Ficalbi, 1889) (7 females), Culex pipiens Linnaeus, 1758 (116 females), C. tritaeniorhynchus Giles, 1901 (82 females) and Uranotaenia unguiculata Edwards, 1913 (2 females). Also, C. pipiens (12 females) and C. tritaeniorhynchus (4 females) were collected with A. albopictus using BG lure traps. Also, 29 larvae were reared from the eggs, collected by egg traps, and were morphologically identified as A. albopictus ( Fig. 3). Moreover, four microscope slides of the male genitalia verified the morphological identification of females and larvae ( Fig. 3). No specimen of the species was captured by means of light traps.

DNA barcoding . The sequences of the COI barcode region were obtained from two specimens of A. albopictus collected from Ghalamgoudeh, Anzali, 37°27'39.6"N, 49°27'43.2"E, 6.VIII.2023 (GenBank accession number: PP564390) and Astara City, 38°25'26.4"N, 48°52'12"E, 19.X.2023 (GenBank accession number: PP564391). The nucleotide sequences were 709 bp (658 bp without primers) as expected. The COI sequences of specimens from Anzali and Astara shared 100% coverage and identity with each other, one haplotype, and identical with the sequences in GenBank of specimens of A. albopictus from China (Shanghai, KX266726.1), Italy ( JX 679374.1), South Korea ( MW829500 ) and Türkiye ( MK 714006.1). Eight selected sequences with 100% coverage were compared from China ( MT 890465.1, MZ 007511.1, OR237214.1), Congo ( MN 299017.1), Germany ( JQ 388786.1), India ( KJ 410335.1), Malaysia (KY817524.1) and Thailand ( OK 413073.1) (similarity range 99.54–99.85%) ( Fig. 4, Table 1). Variable bases of the COI barcode sequences obtained from the Iranian specimens and overlapping sequences from GenBank were presented in Table 1. Translation of nucleotide sequence to amino acids resulted in an alignment of 219 amino acids, eight (3.6%) of which were variable ( Table 1).