Life Cycle and Cytogenetic Study of Mosquitoes (Diptera: Culicidae)

Abstract

Mosquitoes fall into the Culicidae family of the order Diptera within class Insecta and members of the phylum Arthropod. This family includes two important medical and veterinary important disease vectors due to their roles for transmission of various viruses, bacteria, and parasites-Anophelinae and Culicinae. The mosquitoes undergo four stages of transformation during their lifetime: egg, larva, pupa, and adult. These have complete metamorphoses or so called Holometabola. Commonly known as the southern house mosquito, Culex quinquefasciatus Say is a medium-sized brown insect that exists throughout the tropics and the lower latitudes of temperate regions, and a vector of many pathogens of humans as well as both domestic and wild animals. Although an intensified interest in mosquito cytogenetics in the past decade has produced a number of contributions to knowledge on this subject, the available information is still superficial and limited to a few mosquito species only. Therefore, the karyotype of the populations of the mosquito C. quinquefasciatus has been studied collected from three provinces: Babylon, Baghdad, and Wasit of Iraq. The study showed that the chromosomes karyotyping of this species consisted of three pairs of chromosomes (i.e., 2n = 6). In conclusion, it is stressed that prospects are especially good for evolutionary and genetic studies involving chromosomal polymorphism.