The Taxonomic Signal of the Internal Mosquito Wing Cells.

Abstract BackgroundPrevious publications revealed a clear taxonomic signal embedded in the external contour of the wings. Our study explored this signal also for internal cells of the wings, with the following question: do internal cells uniformly provide the same taxonomic information? MethodsOur study focused on four species, three of them of medical importance: Ae. aegypti, Ae. albopictus, Ae. scutellaris and Ve. dux, each of them represented by 30 female wings. Each cell was characterized for size and shape after an elliptic Fourier analysis. For each cell to be tentatively assigned to its respective species, i.e., to measure its amount of taxonomic information, we used the shape of the contour, not its size. ResultsWe showed that the taxonomic signal of shape was not uniformly spread among internal cells of the wing, ranging on average from 80% to 94%. Four internal cells out of six performed better than the external contour of the wing. The amount of taxonomic information of internal cells could not be related to their size nor to their shape complexity, but clearly depended on which species were compared. The closest species of our sample, Ae. albopictus and Ae. scutellaris, two species frequently found in the same water collections in Thailand, were almost perfectly separated (97%) by a single cell. ConclusionIt has already been said that the wing can be used for mosquito identification even if the whole body is not available, we showed that even partly damaged wings could contain extractable and more accurate taxonomic information.