Diversity and plasticity in mosquito feeding patterns: a meta-analysis of ‘universal’ DNA diet studies

Although mosquitoes can have innate preferences for particular blood-meal hosts, their realised feeding patterns on different host species can be modified under climate and land use change, with implications for disease spread. It is therefore important to understand the niche breadth of vectors and to what extent shifts in feeding patterns are predictable. We investigated global shifts in feeding patterns among different functional and taxonomic groups of host species for six prominent disease-vectoring mosquitoes.Time period: 2000–2019. Major taxa studied: six disease-vectoring mosquito species: Aedes aegypti, Ae. albopictus, Anopheles funestus, An. gambiae, Culex pipiens, and Cx. quinquefasciatus. Focusing on blood meal studies that used universal molecular methods, we compiled evidence from >15,600 blood-meals for the six mosquito species. We estimated mosquito’s host niche breadth, and we used hierarchical Dirichlet regression models to investigate shifts in feeding patterns in ..., We compiled blood meal data from the literature for six focal mosquito species: Aedes aegypti, Aedes albopictus, Anopheles gambiae, Anopheles funestus, Culex pipiens s.l., and Culex quinquefasciatus. These are of considerable interest as vectors of infectious diseases and feed to various extents on humans. We conducted a systematic literature search that reported counts of mosquitos feeding on different blood-meal hosts. Our initial search (August 2022) was broad and afforded us a “bird’s eye view” of the literature. For this, we used Web of Science, Pubmed, Scopus, GoogleScholar online databases with the search terms ‘bloodmeal*’, ‘blood meal’, blood-meal’, ‘feeding’, ‘habit’, ‘pattern*’, ‘preference*’, ‘interaction*’, combined with the terms ‘mosquito*’, ‘vector*’, ‘vector-host’, ‘host*’, ‘vertebrate*’, ‘animal*’. The asterisk (‘*’) was used to search for possible variations of terms. Our subsequent systematic search of the literature (July-September 2023) focused on Web of Science an..., , # Data from: Diversity and plasticity in mosquito feeding patterns: a meta-analysis of ‘universal’ DNA diet studies

[https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.18931zd70](https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.18931zd70)

## Description of the data and file structure

We compiled blood meal data from the literature (see methods) for six focal mosquito species: *Aedes aegypti*, *Aedes albopictus*, *Anopheles gambiae*, *Anopheles funestus*, *Culex pipiens* s.l., and *Culex quinquefasciatus*. For detailed method description, references, and description of the analysis, refer to the published paper: Lee, M., R. O'Rorke, N. J. Clark, T. U. Webster, and K. Wells. (2025) Diversity and Plasticity in Mosquito Feeding Patterns: A Meta-Analysis of ‘Universal’ DNA Diet Studies.” Global Ecology and Biogeography 34, no. 6: e70077. [https://doi.org/10.1111/geb.70077](https://doi.org/10.1111/geb.70077).

The provided data set consists of three files with computer code in the programming language R ([https://cran.r-project....,