Effect of oral infection of La Crosse virus on survival and fecundity of native Ochlerotatus triseriatus and invasive Stegomyia albopicta

Arboviruses can have benign, deleterious, or beneficial effects on the vector. We tested the hypothesis that oral infection with La Crosse virus (LACV) will have little to no effect on mosquito longevity and fecundity, a prediction of low virulence selected in a system with frequent vertical transmission. We tested the effects of infection in native Ochlerotatus triseriatus Say and invasive Stegomyia albopicta Skuse (Diptera: Culicidae). We artificially fed adult female mosquitoes of each species with either LACV-infected or uninfected bovine blood and determined adult longevity and fecundity. For females fed LACV-infected blood, bodies and legs, respectively, were separately homogenized and assayed by quantitative reverse transcriptase-polymerase chain reaction (qRT-PCR) to determine the LACV infection and dissemination rates. Ochlerotatus triseriatus had a higher infection and dissemination rate than St. albopicta. For both species, female size had no effect on infection status. Infection status also had no effect on longevity or fecundity for both species. We suggest that the high frequency of vertical transmission may have selected for strains of the virus with low virulence in two vectors, in spite of their different evolutionary histories with the virus.