Resources
UTEP's Mosquito Ecology and Surveillance Laboratory (MESL) is committed to its research goals of determining mosquito population trends, detecting arboviruses circulating in the El Paso area, and collaborating with regional partners. Those goals in mind we further aim to serve the scientific community sharing our knowledge of mosquito identification and trapping methods. MESL has also supported many undergraduate students from various research programs such as Bridges to the Baccalaureate, STEM-Grow, CDB-REU, and students from different UTEP graduate programs.
With the increasing importance of mosquito-borne diseases in the United States, identification becomes even more important than in the past. However, identification guides are difficult to come by. These pages offer a set of images and accompanying text produced by the Centers for Disease Control for the generic identification of mosquito larvae and adults. The images have been digitized by the UTEP Biodiversity Collections from slides originally produced by the CDC in the 1970s.
Users may view the slides and text for either the adult identification set or the larva set. Proceed through the set by clicking on "next" at the bottom of each slide. (Note: files are over 9mb and 7mb respectively.)
Mosquitoes are vectors for a number of diseases. Other sections of this website detail the diseases and their carriers. This section is concerned primarily with what we know about the mosquitoes and mosquito-mediated diseases in the Greater El Paso/Juarez Region: distribution, ecology, and occurrence of mosquito-born diseases in the region.
The traditional purposes of mosquito surveys is to identify breeding sites, identify species and their relative abundances, establish the need for control, and evaluate the efficacy of control methods.
To these, we may add production of predictive models, the ability to develop quantitative methods to calculate the probability of the emergence of a vector-borne disease based on the availability of vectors, reservoirs, and potential for introduction of the pathogen.