Comparative evaluation of two lures to attract female mosquitoes in an urban natural reserve during daytime.

The most widely used attractant to capture adult female mosquitoes is CO2. However, there are also baits available on the market that emit a scent resembling human skin. These baits were specifically designed to attract highly anthropophilic species such as Aedes albopictus and Aedes aegypti. In this study, we compare the effectiveness of CDC traps baited either with CO2 or with a commercial blend simulating skin odor, BG-Sweetscent, for trapping female mosquitoes during daylight hours in an urban reserve in the City of Buenos Aires. We employed a hurdle generalized linear mixed model to analyze trap capture probability and the number of mosquitoes captured per hour, considering the effects of attractant, mosquito species, and their interaction. Traps baited with CO2 captured ten mosquito species, while those baited with BG-Sweetscent captured six in overall significantly lower abundance. The odds of capturing mosquitoes were 292% higher for the CO2-baited traps than for those baited with BG-Sweetscent. No evidence of a combined effect of attractant type and species on female mosquito captures per hour was found. Results indicated that CDC traps baited with CO2 were more effective than those baited with BG-Sweetscent in capturing more mosquito species and a higher number of mosquitoes within each species, even if the species captured with CO2 exhibited a certain level of anthropophilia. This result has practical implications for mosquito surveillance and control in urban natural reserves.

ATLANTIC ANTS: a data set of ants in Atlantic Forests of South America.

Ants, an ecologically successful and numerically dominant group of animals, play key ecological roles as soil engineers, predators, nutrient recyclers, and regulators of plant growth and reproduction in most terrestrial ecosystems. Further, ants are widely used as bioindicators of the ecological impact of land use. We gathered information of ant species in the Atlantic Forest of South America. The ATLANTIC ANTS data set, which is part of the ATLANTIC SERIES data papers, is a compilation of ant records from collections (18,713 records), unpublished data (29,651 records), and published sources (106,910 records; 1,059 references), including papers, theses, dissertations, and book chapters published from 1886 to 2020. In total, the data set contains 153,818 ant records from 7,636 study locations in the Atlantic Forest, representing 10 subfamilies, 99 genera, 1,114 ant species identified with updated taxonomic certainty, and 2,235 morphospecies codes. Our data set reflects the heterogeneity in ant records, which include ants sampled at the beginning of the taxonomic history of myrmecology (the 19th and 20th centuries) and more recent ant surveys designed to address specific questions in ecology and biology. The data set can be used by researchers to develop strategies to deal with different macroecological and region-wide questions, focusing on assemblages, species occurrences, and distribution patterns. Furthermore, the data can be used to assess the consequences of changes in land use in the Atlantic Forest on different ecological processes. No copyright restrictions apply to the use of this data set, but we request that authors cite this data paper when using these data in publications or teaching events.