It's always flies I need help identifying

[urbpan]

This dead one I'm 99 percent sure is an Aedes mosquito, the genus that includes Asian tiger mosquitoes and yellow fever mosquitoes, and is notorious for biting in daylight hours and flying for miles to do so.  I think they also lay eggs in dry places that will be wet, and the eggs hatch when it rains.  It's the groovy black and white pattern that makes me think so.

But the live one I'm holding in the first picture is indistinct to me, since I don't know what to look for.  Any help, entomologists?

Comments

[badnoodles.livejournal.com]

The top one looks like one of the Culex pipiens complex. I can't be sure of that because I can't see the tip of the abdomen or the wing scales very well, but the general lack of white on her (no major tarsal or proboscis rings, no major pattern on the thorax) make me think Culex, and what look like some white scales at the top of the head make me think pipiens.

That, and she just matches my internal search pattern for a quinque, but you don't really have those up in Boston. In either case, it's a stagnant water and treehole breeder, probably originating not far from where you caught her.

[urbpan.livejournal.com]

I'm not hoping to get more specific than genus, but I'd kind of like to establish that these are non-native species. My hunch is that in urban pest control we're mostly dealing with non-native container-breeding species. Both pictures were taken in the same spot, in the zoo, behind a water feature. The dead one is actually on a mosquito magnet. The live one I picked off of me as she was trying to bite me.

Culex pipiens is the european house mosquito, no?

[badnoodles.livejournal.com]

The C. pipiens species complex is very much a ubiquitous, native pest. Anywhere there's dirty, stagnant water, you'll find them. They don't seem to travel far from their point of origin unless pressed. Although the various members of the complex are very hard to separate, you've almost certainly got C. p. pipiens, sinc you're so far north.

C. p. pipiens is commonly called the Northern House Mosquito. It's an effecient transmitter of a variety of encephalites, and is probably the most important bridge vector between birds and humans.

Some good info from Marin/Sonoma
And one from Rutgers