Making Mosquito Taxonomy Useful: A Stable Classification of Tribe Aedini that Balances Utility with Current Knowledge of Evolutionary Relationships.

ABSTRACT: The tribe Aedini (Family Culicidae) contains approximately one-quarter of the known species of mosquitoes, including vectors of deadly or debilitating disease agents. This tribe contains the genus Aedes, which is one of the three most familiar genera of mosquitoes. During the past decade, Aedini has been the focus of a series of extensive morphology-based phylogenetic studies published by Reinert, Harbach, and Kitching (RH&K). Those authors created 74 new, elevated or resurrected genera from what had been the single genus Aedes, almost tripling the number of genera in the entire family Culicidae. The proposed classification is based on subjective assessments of the "number and nature of the characters that support the branches" subtending particular monophyletic groups in the results of cl

SUBMITTER: Wilkerson RC 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4520491 | biostudies-literature | 2015

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature