Tracking down invasions of the yellow fever mosquito, Aedes aegypti, at different time scales

Join us on Friday September 20th for the first Connecticut Entomological Society meeting of the academic year with speaker Andrea Gloria-Soria. We will meet on the Yale University campus in ESC building room 110. A social hour will start at 6:30 pm with pizza, drinks, and snacks provided. At 7:30 we will have a short business meeting immediately followed by Dr. Gloria-Soria's presentation of her research on the yellow fever mosquito.

Abstract:

The yellow fever mosquito, Aedes aegypti, is considered by some as “the most dangerous animal in the world” due to the impact on human health caused by the viral diseases it transmits. Historically driven by human movement, this tropical mosquito has spread throughout the world from its original native in Africa to tropical and subtropical regions around the world. Furthermore, recent reports suggest Ae. aegypti is adapting to survive and breed at the extreme limits of its temperature limits, putting millions of immune naïve people at risk. We have built a global genetic panel of Ae. aegypti populations around the world and successfully used it to identify the origin of historical and modern introductions of this species. This information is relevant to vector control departments and public health officials to stop current and future invasions, and also highlights the tight link between the history of humans and Ae. aegypti