Humans Push Mosquitoes to Adapt

Every time you put on bug spray this summer, you’re launching a strike in the ongoing war between humans and mosquitoes — one that is rapidly driving the evolution of the pests. Scientists studying mosquitoes in various types of environments in the United States and in Russia found that between 5 and 20 percent of a mosquito population’s genome is subject to evolutionary pressures at any given time — creating a strong signature of local adaptation to environment and humans. This means that individual populations are likely to have evolved resistance to whatever local selection pressures are typical in their area — and that understanding the genomes of those populations could one day help inform agencies about which pesticides are likely to be most effective against them. “Mosquitoes adapt to heat, lifestyle, pesticides and so on — and we see traces of that in their genome,” said Sergey Nuzhdin, professor of biological sciences and corresponding author of the study, which was published

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• Linh Mai