1,813 of the 8,132 Spanish municipalities have already been colonized by some kind of Invasive mosquito. This has been revealed by a distribution map of the Tigre mosquitothe one of the yellow fever and the of Japanwhich collects Two decades of field surveillance after the arrival in 2004 of the Tigre mosquito. The novelty of the study, published in the magazine Insectslies in the integration of multiple sources of information: data obtained through sampling of eggs, larvae and adults, by the more than 40 authors of the study, the CC.AA. and the Ministry of Health, and the 110,939 observations sent by 33,183 people through the app Mosquito Alert.
He Tigre mosquito It is the most widespread species and is present in 1,768 municipalities, including the most populated in the State, which implies that two out of three Spaniards (66.2%) live exposed to their bites.
He Japan mosquitodiscovered by Mosquito Alert in 2018, has been detected in 111 municipalities in northern Spain, in 68 of them next to the Tiger. He Yellow fever mosquito It is, for now, circumscribed to introductions in Canary Islands.
The research has been led by the head of Entomology and Validation of Mosquito Alert data and researcher at the Center for Advanced Studies of Blanes (CEAB-CSIC), Roger Eritja, and the co-director of Mosquito Alert, Frederic Bartumeus. Eritja has assured that the Field entomological surveillance It is “irreplaceable” and can benefit from synergies with New technologies and with strategies based on the Social cooperationbecause a third of the detections comes from citizen science.
