Talk:Culicoides variipennis

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Question[edit]

I recently studied the Culicoides genus in my Veterinary Entomology course here at UC Berkley and I have a question - what makes the variipennis species unique from the other Culicoides? They all seemed very similar from what I have seen.

Well, there are a lot of Culicoides species, around 500 according to the main article. What makes a species different than others in its genus would be size (variipennis is on the smaller side of Culicoides), location (variipennis is in areas of the United States while other species can be found in Europe or other locations around the world), what it can be a vector for (variipennis is a vector for Blue Tongue Virus, Epizootic Hemorrhagic Disease, African horse sickness virus, and akabane virus while other Culicoides can be a vector for Mansonella, Onchocerca gibsoni and O. cervicalis, Leucocytozoon, Plasmodium agamae, bovine ephemeral fever (C. osystoma and C. nipponesis), and Queensland itch), and a lot of other biological differences. For some quick physical tags of Culicoides variipennis: it is around 1mm long, the wings spotted and narrow with few veins (they will be folded over while resting) while the larvae are slender, transparent to orange colored and worm-like. Even with all this, there are variations within the variipennis species as there are multiple subspecies which differ in palpal size, spicules, and other morphological distinctions along with different habitat locations and vectoring ability. Mfhoenig (talk) 05:39, 1 December 2013 (UTC)mfhoenig[reply]