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Fig. 1 | Malaria Journal

Fig. 1

From: The portfolio effect cushions mosquito populations and malaria transmission against vector control interventions

Fig. 1

A schematic illustration of how a hypothetical but typical guild of four common African malaria vectors may span the full range of behavioural preferences for biting humans indoors versus outdoors, and biting humans versus animals. While An. funestus has a very strong preference for humans [28, 42], it is capable of biting early in the evening or late in the morning when humans are active and exposed outside the protective reach of long-lasting insecticidal nets [66,67,68,69,70]. Anopheles gambiae has a slightly less strict preference for feeding upon humans [28, 42] and can also feed outdoors at dawn and dusk to some degree in some locations [17, 71]. Anopheles arabiensis is notoriously phenotypically plastic in its expression of both behaviours, spanning a very wide range of human blood indices [28, 42] and often biting outdoors in the early evenings in settings where effective indoor vector control has been implemented [17, 72]. While Anopheles rivulorum typically prefers to feed upon animals, and tends to be most active at dusk and dawn, it is nevertheless a vector of malaria in its own right, contributing significantly to residual transmission in some settings [51, 73, 74]

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