CONICET | Buscador de Institutos y Recursos Humanos

Aedes albopictus (Diptera: Culicidae) is a vector of severalarboviruses, distributed from Misiones to the northern ofCorrientes province in Argentina. Its wide distribution around theworld has been attributed to rapid reproduction and adaptivecapacity to different environments. The objective of this work wasto search morphological patterns of Aedes albopictuspopulations, using wing geometric morphometric analysis. Ourstudy area was the city of Puerto Iguazu and Iguazu NationalPark, characterized in three environments: urban (UR), periurban(PU) and sylvatic (SY). Ovitraps were placed in theseenvironments to obtain eggs. The larvae from hatched eggs werereared in the laboratory until the emergence of adults. A total of179 female wings were extracted and photographed. Seventeen(17) landmarks (LM) were placed on the images and aGeneralized Procrustes Analysis was applied. Univariate andmultivariate analyses were performed on the shape and centroidsize. Wing size of PU was larger than SY (p-value=0.0096). Incontrast, those of UR had intermediate size values and morevariability. Heterogeneity conditions and resources present inurban environments could influence the size of females bredthere and their offspring. The metric disparity index (as anestimate of wing shape variance) did not show significantdifferences among environments, although an increasedvariability was observed from the sylvatic environment(SY=0.00092) to the urban environment (UR=0.00101). Thispattern could be associated with an environment more disturbedby human activity. Scatter plot of Canonical variate analysisshowed overlap among the shapes of different environments,however, the permutation test was significant between UR andPU (p=0.0019) and between SY and UR (p=0.0457). Crossvalidatedreclassification had overall accuracy of 64 % with ahigher percentage for UR (68.4%). Therefore, UR shapes couldbe partially differentiated by their morphological distances,observed in the cluster analysis and less classification error,indicating a particular or more dissimilar form. Wing morphologyhas differences among environments, and the shape variablesdiscriminate most individuals. Anthropic processes whichaffecting the urban environment, as well as environmentalcharacteristics, could be associated with variability in shape andsize, and operate selectively on morphs. While between sylvanand peri-urban environments, less differences were observedwhich could be related to common characteristics that also affectthe shape. These possible morphological structural patterns ofAedes albopictus could be complemented in the future by geneticstudies.

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