Mosquito-specialist spiders

Abstract

What does ‘mosquito specialist’mean? A mosquito specialist is a predator that actively prefers mosquitoes, by which we mean that it is differentially motivated to capture mosquitoes among possible prey. This would make it extraordinarily useful, as it would be targeting an insect that matters to people. At best, the mosquito is a nuisance and, at worst,it is a notorious disease vector. There may be many predators that eat alot of mosquitoes, but experimental evidence is needed to show that a predator has the sensory capacity to distinguish mosquitoes from other prey and that it deploys a strategy of choosing this specific prey type. Thereis one predator for which the required evidence is actually available: its name is Evarcha culicivora (Figure 1), a jumping spider (family Salticidae) from the Lake Victoria region of East Africa.