Yellow Fever Mosquito

• It breeds almost exclusively in artificial containers of clean water: plant pot saucers, tyres, drums and guttering, which has made it a fully urban mosquito.
• Its eggs survive for months when dry and hatch as soon as they are wetted, so they travel the world inside used tyres and ornamental plants.
• Two new techniques are used against it: releasing sterile males and introducing the bacterium Wolbachia, which stops the mosquito from transmitting the viruses.
• It transmits dengue, yellow fever, Zika and chikungunya, and it is the urban mosquito par excellence: it breeds in any container holding clean water in and around houses.
• It bites by day, above all at dawn and dusk, which makes bed nets of little use against it.
• It is an intermittent biter: it interrupts and resumes feeding several times and on several people, which multiplies its effectiveness as a transmitter.
• Its eggs withstand desiccation for months. Laid on the dry wall of a container, they wait for the first rain to hatch, and that is the mechanism by which it travels around the world in used tyres.
• A remarkable strategy is being deployed against it: infecting it with the bacterium Wolbachia, which blocks the replication of the dengue virus inside the mosquito itself and spreads through the population on its own. Trials by the World Mosquito Program in Indonesia managed to cut dengue cases by around 77%.
• It is native to Africa and spread with the slave trade and maritime traffic from the 17th century onwards.

Skeleton type

Invertebrate - chitin exoskeleton (insect)

Habitat and environment

Tropical and subtropical urban areas, in containers of standing water

Size at birth

Smooth, ovoid and elongated egg of about 1 mm; white when laid and glossy black within minutes

Sexual maturity

The female needs a blood meal to mature each batch of eggs; the number of eggs depends on the size of that meal

Gestation / incubation

The egg develops in barely two days in a warm climate and up to a week in a temperate one; once submerged it hatches at once

Litter / clutch size

100 to 200 eggs per clutch after each blood meal, with up to five clutches over a lifetime; the eggs are laid one by one, not in a raft

Sources consulted: https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aedes_aegypti; Dengue Virus Net, ciclo de vida de Aedes aegypti; Estudio de vuelo libre de Aedes aegypti; datos morfometricos de ala (1,67-3,83 mm); Estudio de vuelo libre de Aedes aegypti (arXiv 1205.5260); Dengue Virus Net; CDC, ciclo de vida de los mosquitos Aedes

Best time: It breeds in artificial water containers, in and around dwellings; the eggs survive dry for more than a year, which makes control enormously difficult