Controversies over the scientific name of the principal mosquito vector of yellow fever virus – expediency versus validity

Abstract

The history of the scientific name of the yellow fever mosquito, the vector of yellow fever virus, ranges from 1757 to the early twenty-first century. In his 1757 work Iter Palæstinum, Frederic Hasselquist gave the name Culex aegypti to a mosquito species responsible for fierce attacks on humans in Egypt. That name was never later ascribed to Hasselquist as author, but to Linnaeus, although the name never appeared in any of Linnaeus’ publications. In Cuba, at the end of the nineteenth century, the vector of the unknown infectious agent of yellow fever was first identified as Culex mosquito and later more validly named Stegomyia fasciata. Mosquito taxonomists differed strongly about the name of the mosquito through much of the twentieth century. Interventions by the International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature imposed a biologically invalid specific name, and in the early twenty-first century a phylogenetic analysis of the culicid tribe Aedini restored the genus Stegomyia from a century earlier. That action was short-lived. A phylogenetic reassessment resulted in the return of Stegomyia to subgeneric rank in Aedes; thus, the name of the yellow fever mosquito survives in the traditional classification of convenience as the trinomial Aedes (Stegomyia) aegypti (Linnaeus).