Is it Male or Female??
First, you should familiarize yourself with the structures and terms in the following table:
This
would be a male mosquito. Distinquishing between males
and females is most obvious by examining the antenna of the mosquito.
The male antenna tend to be much hairier than that of the female.
The purpose of these hairs is to attract males to females for mating purposes.
Males do not attack humans or animals. Males feed only on plant nectar.
For this reason, males are useless in West Nile Virus research and are
not included in the study.
Once you have determined if the mosquito is male or female,
it is time to identify it. The first characteristic that should be
observed is the length of the maxillary palps. Only female species
of the Genus Anopheles will have maxillary palps as long as the
proboscis.
The shape
of the abdomen is another characteristic that can be used to help
identify the genus. Genuses that have pointed abdomens include Aedes
and
Psorophora.
Psorophora
have long bristles on the tibia of the hind leg. This distinquishes
them from Aedes. Since over half of the mosquitoes in North
America are Aedes, this characteristic is usually enough to identify
the genus.