2026 Undergraduate Research Showcase

Document Type

Student Presentation

Presentation Date

4-24-2026

Faculty Sponsor

Dr. Stephanie J. Galla

Abstract

Climate change in the Arctic is accelerating much faster than the rest of the globe, changing the disease ecology of Arctic environments. A prime example of this are disease carrying mosquitoes (Family: Culicidae) expanding their realized habitats and interacting with new animal hosts. To understand this changing disease ecology in the new Arctic, methods to identify disease vectors- like mosquitoes- are needed. This study aims to identify mosquitoes that may carry avian malaria (Plasmodium spp.) taken from nests of immunologically naive Arctic Gyrfalcons (Falco rusticolus). This ongoing study focuses on characterizing mosquito species found in Gyrfalcon nests in Nome, Alaska to begin understanding the complex and shifting network of disease vectors and hosts. Mosquitoes were collected in Nome, Alaska Gyrfalcon nests in the Summer of 2025. The mosquitoes were then sorted into sex, genera, and morphotype. Our preliminary results indicate that our collected mosquitoes are almost all female and of the genus Aedes. Due to the condition of the mosquitoes we ruled out species identification using established dichotomous keys and opted to identify species level using DNA. We used the QIAGEN DNeasy extraction kit to extract DNA from 22 mosquitoes representative of diverse morphological features. We have amplified the mitochondrial cytochrome oxidase subunit I (COI) and next we will sequence the samples with Sanger sequencing and use the basic local alignment search tool (BLAST) to identify the mosquitoes to species level. This work will contribute to tracking the spread of avian malaria in Arctic systems and identify which mosquitoes are carriers for this avian species in order to provide foundational information for understanding disease risk in Gyrfalcons amidst climate change.

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