Mosquitoes feed on the blood of essentially all terrestrial vertebrates. After a mosquito feeds on the blood of a host animal, the DNA of that animal is detectable in the mosquito gut for several days. By collecting blood fed mosquitoes from the field, their blood meals can be screened for vertebrate DNA, and that DNA can be identified to determine what vertebrate species were fed upon, and thus, to infer what vertebrate species are present at the site where the mosquitoes were collected. In 2024, a collaboration between the University of Florida, University of Guam, and U.S. Department of Agriculture, National Wildlife Research Center explored the potential of using mosquito-based methods for determining the presence of the brown tree snake (an invasive species in Guam responsible for extinctions and extirpations of native birds) at field sites using DNA from the blood meals of mosquitoes. The goals of this work were to train local personnel on field methods for sampling mosquito blood meals, to characterize the host associations of mosquitoes in Guam to identify species most likely to feed from brown tree snakes, to develop resources for mosquito identification in Guam, and to screen field-collected mosquitoes for the presence of brown tree snake DNA.
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