title: Making Mosquito Taxonomy Useful: A Stable Classification of Tribe Aedini that Balances Utility with Current Knowledge of Evolutionary Relationships.
abstract: The tribe Aedini (Family Culicidae) contains approximately one-quarter of the known species of mosquitoes, including vectors of deadly or debilitating disease agents. This tribe contains the genus Aedes, which is one of the three most familiar genera of mosquitoes. During the past decade, Aedini has been the focus of a series of extensive morphology-based phylogenetic studies published by Reinert, Harbach, and Kitching (RH&K). Those authors created 74 new, elevated or resurrected genera from what had been the single genus Aedes, almost tripling the number of genera in the entire family Culicidae. The proposed classification is based on subjective assessments of the "number and nature of the characters that support the branches" subtending particular monophyletic groups in the results of cladistic analyses of a large set of morphological characters of representative species. To gauge the stability of RH&K's generic groupings we reanalyzed their data with unweighted parsimony jackknife and maximum-parsimony analyses, with and without ordering 14 of the characters as in RH&K. We found that their phylogeny was largely weakly supported and their taxonomic rankings failed priority and other useful taxon-naming criteria. Consequently, we propose simplified aedine generic designations that 1) restore a classification system that is useful for the operational community; 2) enhance the ability of taxonomists to accurately place new species into genera; 3) maintain the progress toward a natural classification based on monophyletic groups of species; and 4) correct the current classification system that is subject to instability as new species are described and existing species more thoroughly defined. We do not challenge the phylogenetic hypotheses generated by the above-mentioned series of morphological studies. However, we reduce the ranks of the genera and subgenera of RH&K to subgenera or informal species groups, respectively, to preserve stability as new data become available.
authors.affiliation: Department of Entomology, National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution, Washington DC, United States of America.
authors.forename: Richard C
authors.initials: RC
authors.lastname: Wilkerson
authors.affiliation: Department of Entomology, National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution, Washington DC, United States of America; Walter Reed Biosystematics Unit, Museum Support Center, Smithsonian Institution, Suitland, Maryland, United States of America; Department of Entomology, Walter Reed Army Institute of Research, Silver Spring, Maryland, United States of America; Faculty of Preventative Medicine and Biometrics, Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences, Bethesda, Maryland, United States of America.
authors.forename: Yvonne-Marie
authors.initials: YM
authors.lastname: Linton
authors.affiliation: Entomology Department, School of Environmental and Biological Sciences, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, New Jersey, United States of America.
authors.forename: Dina M
authors.initials: DM
authors.lastname: Fonseca
authors.affiliation: Department of Entomology, National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution, Washington DC, United States of America.
authors.forename: Ted R
authors.initials: TR
authors.lastname: Schultz
authors.affiliation: Entomology Department, School of Environmental and Biological Sciences, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, New Jersey, United States of America.
authors.forename: Dana C
authors.initials: DC
authors.lastname: Price
authors.affiliation: Global Health Program, Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Seattle, Washington, United States of America.
authors.forename: Daniel A
authors.initials: DA
authors.lastname: Strickman
mesh_terms: D000330:Aedes / Q000145:classification*; D000818:Animals; D005075:Biological Evolution; D009033:Culicidae / Q000145:classification*; D006801:Humans; D010802:Phylogeny; D044382:Population Groups