Ecology

Measurement of colony strength traits and Varroa destructor loadHives located in the natural area (henceforth natural hives or colonies) weighed the most (hive weight, Kruskal–Wallis test, p  More

Chromatographic separation and mass spectrometric optimizationTo obtain the best monitoring conditions for each compound, a 0.5 mg/L mixed standard solution of 11 pesticides was mixed with the mobile phase through a syringe pump and then injected into the mass spectrometer for tuning. The precursor ion of the compound to be tested was determined by the primary mass spectrometry scan under ESI+ and ESI- modes, and then the product ion was scanned by the secondary mass spectrometry. Two groups of ion pairs with the best sensitivity were selected for detection; one group was used for quantification, and another, for qualitative analysis. The optimization results showed high sensitivity of all the 11 pesticides under the ESI+ mode. Among them, abamectin (B1a), β-cypermethrin, deltamethrin, fenpropathrin, and bifenthrin were [M + NH4]+, and other compounds were [M + H]+. MS parameters of 11 pesticides are mentioned in Table S2.Formic acid and ammonium acetate are commonly used reagents to enhance the ionization of target compounds [M + H]+ and [M + NH4]+ under the ESI+ mode, and they can effectively improve the peak pattern, making the peak sharper and more symmetrical; therefore, they need to be added during gradient elution38. To improve work efficiency, it is necessary to separate and complete the monitoring of 11 pesticides in the shortest possible time; therefore, we selected two different types of chromatographic columns (ACQUITY UPLC HSS C18 and ACQUITY UPLC HSS T3) and three different mobile phases (Ι: 0.1% formic acid aqueous solution—ACN, II: 0.05% formic acid aqueous solution—ACN, and III: 0.1% formic acid/5 mmol/L ammonium acetate aqueous solution—ACN) for optimization experiments. We observed that when using the HSS T3 chromatographic column, β-cypermethrin, deltamethrin, fenpropathrin, and bifenthrin did not show a good retention effect under the three mobile phase systems, and there was substantial tailing of the chromatographic peak. The shape of the chromatographic peak and sensitivity of the target compound were used as evaluation indicators. Compared with Ι and II, mobile phase III produced better sensitivity for all target compounds (Fig. 1), with sharper and more symmetrical peaks of β-cypermethrin, deltamethrin, fenpropathrin, and bifenthrin. This may be because the addition of 5 mmol/L ammonium acetate improved the retention performance of the HSS C18 chromatography columns without affecting the ionization efficiency of all target compounds. In summary, we selected the HSS C18 column for chromatographic separation and used 0.1% formic acid/5 mmol/L ammonium acetate aqueous solution—ACN as the mobile phase to further optimize the gradient elution procedure and effectively separate and detect all the target compounds within 8 min.Figure 1When using HSS C18, the peak areas of 11 pesticides in three different mobile phases.Full size imageOptimization of purification materialsThe flesh of apricot contains sugar, protein, calcium, phosphorus, carotene, thiamine, riboflavin, niacin, and vitamin C. Due to these diverse impurities, the analysis of the sample matrix becomes highly complex. Therefore, these impurities need to be removed from the matrix samples before analysis. Currently, PSA, C18, and MWCNTs are widely used to adsorb to the fruit substrate39. PSA has a strong adsorption capacity for metal ions, fatty acids, sugars, and fat-soluble pigments, C18 has a strong adsorption capacity for non-polar impurities (such as fat, sterol, and volatile oil), while MWCNTs have a strong adsorption capacity for pigments, which can effectively remove chlorophyll, lutein, and carotene. However, C18 and MWCNTs can also simultaneously adsorb pesticides, resulting in poor recovery. Nano-ZrO2 has a large specific surface area and good adsorption stability and has recently been used to purify substrates. It can selectively remove fats and pigments from samples compared to conventional C18 fillers.In the current study, different purification materials were combined for the analysis of 11 pesticide residues and to propose the best purification strategy in the pretreatment of apricot samples. As displayed in Fig. 2, the average recovery of 11 pesticides in the apricot was higher using the C18/nano-ZrO2/MWCNTs than other combinations. Nano-ZrO2 showed better adsorption than PSA in purifying fatty acids, organic acids, polar pigments, and sugars in apricot, owing to its larger specific surface area, better adsorption capacity, and stability. To conclude, the combination of 10 mg C18, 30 mg nano-ZrO2, and 5 mg MWCNTs demonstrated the best recovery for 11 pesticides, with recovery in the range of 72% to 114%, at a pesticide spiking level of 0.01 mg/kg. In summary, we finally determined that among the tested combinations, C18/nano-ZrO2/MWCNTs (10 mg/ 30 mg/5 mg) is the best purification combination for the pre-treatment of apricot samples.Figure 2The recoveries of 11 pesticides in apricot matrix under different scavenger combinations (2–1 C18/nano-ZrO2/MWCNTs, 2–2 PSA/C18/MWCNTs, 2–3 nano-ZrO2/PSA/MWCNTs; 0.01 mg/kg, n = 3).Full size imageLinearity, matrix effects, limit of detection and limit of quantificationThe standard curve obtained from the standard working solutions of 11 pesticides and the calibration curve from blank apricot matrix spiked with 11 pesticides showed good linearity (0.001, 0.005, 0.01, 0.05, 0.1, and 0.5 mg/L), with R2 ≥ 0.9959 for all tested samples (Table 1).Table 1 The standard curves, R2 and MEs of 11 pesticides in apricot.Full size tableTo evaluate MEs, the slopes of matching 11 pesticide standards with solvent and apricot matrix were calculated at the same concentration. According to the derived slope of the matrix-matched calibration curve, MEs of 11 pesticides in apricot were between 89 and 113% (Table 1), well within the range of 80% to 120%, indicating that the MEs could be ignored. It also suggests that the current pre-treatment method has a good purification effect and eliminates the matrix effect very well, laying a robust foundation for the subsequent step of quantitative analysis of samples. We next used the standard solution curve to quantify the 11 pesticide residues in apricot.The LOD refers to the minimum concentration or minimum amount of a component to be tested that can be detected from a test sample under a given confidence level by an analytical method. Its physical meaning is the amount of the measured component when the signal is 3 times the standard deviation (S = 3σ) of the reagent blank signal (background signal). Sometimes it also refers to the amount of the measured component corresponding to when the signal is three times the background signal generated by the reagent blank (S = 3 N). The LOQ refers to the minimum amount of the analyte in the sample that can be quantitatively determined, and the determination result should have a certain accuracy40. The LOQ reflects whether the analytical method has the sensitive quantitative detection ability. The LOQ is the lowest validated level with sufficient recovery and precision, which was estimated to be 0.001 mg/L, while the LOD is the lowest calibration level, which was 2 µg/kg, according to SANTE/12,682/2020.Accuracy and precisionIn the matrix, 11 pesticides were spiked at four levels (0.002, 0.02, 0.1, and 1 mg/kg), and for each spiked sample, there were six replicates. The recoveries of 11 pesticides in apricot at all levels ranged between 72 and 119%. The inter- and intra-level relative standard deviations (RSDs, %) of 11 pesticides in apricot were  More

All Alteromonas strains support long-term survival of Prochlorococcus under N starvationPrevious research showed that Prochlorococcus, and to some extent Synechococcus depend on co-occurring heterotrophic bacteria to survive various types of stress, including nitrogen starvation [33, 34, 42, 43]. At the first encounter between previously axenic Prochlorococcus and Alteromonas (E1), all co-cultures and axenic controls grew exponentially (Fig. 1B, C). However, all axenic cultures showed a rapid and mostly monotonic decrease in fluorescence starting shortly after the cultures stopped growing, reaching levels below the limit of detection after ~20–30 days. None of the axenic Prochlorococcus cultures were able to re-grow when transferred into fresh media after 60 days (Fig. 1C). In contrast, the decline of co-cultures rapidly slowed, and in some cases was interrupted by an extended “plateau” or second growth stage (Fig. 1B). Across multiple experiments, 92% of the co-cultures contained living Prochlorococcus cells for at least 140 days, meaning that they could be revived by transfer into fresh media. Thus, the ability of Alteromonas to support long-term N starvation in Prochlorococcus was conserved in all analyzed strains.Fig. 1: Experimental designs and overview of the dynamics of Prochlorococcus-Alteromonas co-cultures from first encounter and over multiple transfers.A Schematic illustration of the experimental design. One ml from Experiment E1 was transferred into 20 ml fresh media after 100 days, starting experiment E2. Experiment E2 was similarly transferred into fresh media after 140 days, starting experiment E3. Additional experiments replicating these transfers are described in Supplementary Fig. S1. B Overview of the growth curves of the 25 Prochlorococcus-Alteromonas co-cultures over three transfers spanning ~1.2 years (E1, E2 and E3). Results show mean + standard error from biological triplicates, colored by Prochlorococcus strain as in panel D. C Axenic Prochlorococcus grew exponentially in E1 but failed to grow when transferred into fresh media after 60, 100, or 140 days. Axenic Alteromonas cultures were counted after 60 and 100 days, as their growth cannot be monitored sensitively and non-invasively using fluorescence (optical density is low at these cell numbers). D High reproducibility and strain-specific dynamics of the initial contact between Prochlorococcus and Alteromonas strains (E1). Three biological replicates for each mono-culture and co-culture are shown. Note that the Y axis is linear in panels B, C and logarithmic in panel D. Au: arbitrary units.Full size imageIt has previously been shown that Prochlorococcus MIT9313 is initially inhibited by co-culture with Alteromonas HOT1A3, while Prochlorococcus MED4 is not [12, 32]. This “delayed growth” phenotype was observed here too, was specific to MIT9313 (not observed in other Prochlorococcus strains) and occurred with all Alteromonas strains tested (Fig. 1D). MIT9313 belongs to the low-light adapted clade IV (LLIV), which are relatively distant from other Prochlorococcus strains and differ from them in multiple physiological aspects including the structure of their cell wall [44], the use of different (and nitrogen-containing) compatible solutes [45], and the production of multiple peptide secondary metabolites (lanthipeptides, [46, 47]). LLIV cells also have larger genomes, and are predicted to take up a higher diversity of organic compounds such as sugars and amino acids [48]. It is intriguing that specifically this strain, which has higher predicted metabolic and regulatory flexibilities [49], is the only one initially inhibited in co-culture with Alteromonas.Differences in co-culture phenotype are related to Prochlorococcus and not Alteromonas strains and occur primarily during the decline stageWhile co-culture with all Alteromonas strains had a major effect on Prochlorococcus viability after long-term starvation, there was no significant effect of co-culture on traditional metrics of growth such as maximal growth rate, maximal fluorescence, and lag phase (with the exception of the previously described inhibition of MIT9313; Fig. 2A–C). However, a visual inspection of the growth curves suggested subtle yet consistent differences in the shape of the growth curve, and especially the decline phase, between the different Prochlorococcus strains in the co-cultures (Fig. 1D). To test this, we used the growth curves as input for a principal component analysis (PCA), revealing that the growth curves from each Prochlorococcus strain clustered together, regardless of which Alteromonas strain they were co-cultured with (Fig. 2D). The growth curves of all high-light adapted strains (MED4, MIT9312, and MIT0604) were relatively similar, the low-light I strain NATL2A was somewhat distinct, and the low-light IV strain MIT9313 was a clear outlier (Fig. 2D), consistent with this strain being the only one initially inhibited in all co-cultures. Random forest classification supported the observation that the growth curve shapes were affected more by the Prochlorococcus rather than Alteromonas strains, and also confirmed the visual observation that most of the features differentiating between Prochlorococcus strains occurred during culture decline (random forest is a supervised machine learning algorithm explained in more detail in Supplementary Text S2; see also Supplementary Fig. S2). Thus, co-culture with Alteromonas affects the decline stage of Prochlorococcus in co-culture in a way that differs between Prochlorococcus but not Alteromonas strains.Fig. 2: Growth analysis and principal component analysis (PCA) of the growth curves from all co-cultures during 140 days of E1.A Growth rate, B Maximum fluorescence, and C duration of lag phase during experiment E1. Box-plots represent mean and 75th percentile of co-cultures, circles represent measurements of individual cultures of the axenic controls. The only significant difference between axenic and co-cultures is in the length of the lag phase for MIT9313 (Bonferroni corrected ANOVA, p  More

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The framework of Swin MSIWe established the first Swin Transformer-based mosquito species identification (Swin MSI) model, with the help of self-constructed image dataset and multi-adjustment-test. Gradient-weighted class activation mapping was used to visualize the identification process (Fig. 1a). The key Swin Transformer block was described on Fig. 1b. Based on practical needs, Swin MSI was additional designed to identify Culex pipiens Complex on the subspecies level (Fig. 1c) and novel mosquito (which was defined as ones beyond 17 species in our dataset) classification attribution (Fig. 1d). Detailed results are shown in the following sections.Figure 1The Framework of Swin MSI. (a)The basic architecture for mosquito features extraction and identification. Attention visualization generated by filters at each layer are shown. (b) Details for Swin Transformer block. (c) For mosquito within our dataset 17 species, output is the top 5 confidence species. (d) For mosquito beyond 17 species (defined as novel species), whether the output is a species or a genus is decided after comparing with confidence threshold.Full size imageMosquito datasetsWe established the highest-definition and most-balanced mosquito image dataset to date. The mosquito image dataset covers 7 genera and 17 species (including 3 morphologically similar subspecies in the Cx. pipiens Complex), which covers the most common and important disease-transmitting mosquitoes at the global scale, with a total of 9,900 mosquito images. The image resolution was 4464 × 2976 pixels. The specific taxonomic status and corresponding images are shown in Fig. 2. Due to the limitation of field collection, Ae. vexans, Coquillettidia ochracea, Mansonia uniformis, An. vagus and Toxorhynchites splendens only have females or only have males. In addition, each mosquito species included 300 images of both sexes, which was large enough and same number for each species, in order to balance the capacity and variety of training sets.Figure 2Taxonomic status and index of mosquito species included in this study Both male and female mosquitoes were photographed from different angles such as dorsal, left side, right side, ventral side, etc. Except for 5 species, each mosquito includes 300 images of both sexes, and the resolution of mosquito photos were 4464 × 2976. Cx. pipiens quinquefasciatus, Cx. pipiens pallens, and Cx. pipiens molestus (subspecies level, in dark gray background) were 3 subspecies in Cx. pipiens Complex (species level).Full size imageWorkflow for mosquito species identificationA three-stage flowchart of building best deep learning model for identification of mosquito species model was adopted (Fig. 3). The first learning stage was conducted by three CNNs (the Mask R-CNN, DenseNet, and YOLOv5) and three transformer models (the Detection Transformer, Vision Transformer, and Swin Transformer). Based on the performance of the first-stage model and the real mosquito labels, the second learning stage involved adjusting the model parameters of the three Swin Transformer variants (T, B, and L) to compare their performances. The third learning stage involved testing the effects of inputting differently sized images (384 × 384 and 224 × 224) to the Swin Transformer-L model; finally, we proposed a deep learning model for mosquito species identification (Swin MSI) to test the recognition effects of different mosquito species. The model was validated on different mosquito species, with a focus on the identification accuracy of three subspecies within the Cx. pipiens Complex and the detection effect of novel mosquito species.Figure 3Flowchart of testing deep learning model for intelligent identification of mosquito species.Full size imageComparison between the CNN model and Transformer model results (1st round of learning)Figure 4a shows the accuracies obtained for the six different computer vision network models tested on the mosquito picture test set. The test results show that the transformer network model had a higher mosquito species discrimination ability than the CNN.Figure 4Comparison of mosquito recognition effects of computer vision network models and variants. (a) Comparison of mosquito identification accuracy between 3 CNNs and 3 Transformer; (b) The best effect CNN (YOLOv5) training set loss curve(blue), validation set loss curve(green) and validation set accuracy curve(orange); (c) The best effect Transformer (Swin Transformer) training set loss curve, validation set loss curve and validation set accuracy curve. (d) Swin-MSI-T test result confusion matrix; (e) Swin-MSI -B test result confusion matrix; (f) Swin-MSI -L test result confusion matrix. Confusion matrix of mosquito labels in which odd numbers represent females and even numbers represent males. The small squares in the confusion matrix represent the recognition readiness rate, from red to green, the recognition readiness rate is getting higher and higher An. sinensis: 1, 2; Cx. pipiens quinquefasciatus: 3, 4; Cx. pipiens pallens: 5, 6; Cx. pipiens molestus: 7,8 Cx. modestus: 9,10; Ae. albopictus: 11, 12 Ae. aegypti: 13, 14; Cx. pallidothorax: 15, 16 Ae. galloisi: 17,18 Ae. vexans: 19, 20; Ae. koreicus: 21, 22 Armigeres subalbatus: 23, 24; Coquillettidia ochracea: 25, 26 Cx. gelidus: 27, 28 Cx. triraeniorhynchus: 29, 30 Mansonia uniformis: 31, 32 An. vagus: 33, 34 Ae. elsaie: 35,36 Toxorhynchites splendens: 37, 38.Full size imageIn the CNN training process (applied to YOLOv5), the validation accuracy requires more than 110 epochs to grow to 0.9, and the validation loss requires 110 epochs to drop to a flat interval; in contrast, during the training step, these losses represent a continuously decreasing process. These results indicate that the deep learning model derived based on the Swin Transformer algorithm was able to achieve a higher recognition accuracy in less time than the rapid convergence ability of the CNN during the iterative process (Fig. 4b).The Swin Transformer model exhibited the highest test accuracy of 96.3%. During the training process, the loss of this model could stabilize after 30 epochs, and its validation accuracy could grow to 0.9 after 20 epochs; during the validation step, the loss can drop to 0.36 after 20 epochs, after which the loss curve fluctuated but did not produce adverse effects (Fig. 4c). Based on the excellent performance of the Swin Transformer model, this model was used as the baseline to carry out the subsequent analyses.Swin Transformer model variant adjustment (2nd round of learning)Following testing performed to clarify the superior performance of the Swin Transformer algorithm, we chose different Drop_path_rate, Embed_dim and Depths parameter settings and labeled the parameter sets as the Swin Transformer-T, Swin Transformer-B, and Swin Transformer-L variants. Drop_path is an efficient regularization method, and an asymmetric Drop_path_rate is beneficial for supervised representation learning when using image classification tasks and Transformer architectures. The Embed_dim parameter represents the image dimensions obtained after the input red–green–blue (RGB) image is calculated by the Swin Transformer block in stage 1. The Depths parameter is the number of Swin Transformer blocks used in the four stages. The parameter information and test results are shown in Table 1. Due to the increase in the Swin Transformer block and Embed_dim parameters in stage 3, the recognition accuracies of the three variants were found to be 95.8%, 96.3%, and 98.2%, Correspondingly, the f1 score were 96.2%, 96.7% and 98.3%; thus, these variants could effectively improve the mosquito species identification ability in a manner similar to the CNN by increasing the number of convolutional channels to extract more features and improve the overall classification ability. In this study, the Swin Transformer-L variant, which exhibited the highest accuracy, was selected as the baseline for the next work.Table 1 Parameters and test accuracy of three variants of Swin Transformer.Full size tableBy plotting a confusion matrix of the test set results derived using the three Swin Transformer variants, we clearly obtained the proportion of correct and incorrect identifications in each category to visually reflect the mosquito species discrimination ability (Fig. 4d–f). In the matrix, the darker diagonal colors indicate higher identification rate accuracies of the corresponding mosquito categories. Among them, five mosquito species were missing because the Ae. vexans, Coquillettidia ochracea, Mansonia uniformis, An. vagus and Toxorhynchites splendens species were represented in the dataset by only females or only males. The confusion matrix shown in Panel C lists the lowest number of mosquito species identification error points and the lowest accuracy level obtained in each category, suggesting that the Swin Transformer-L model has a better classification performance than the Swin Transformer-T and Swin Transformer-B models.Effect of the input image size on the discrimination ability (3rd round of learning)To investigate the relationship between the input image size and mosquito species identification performance, in this study, we conducted a comparison test between input images with sizes of 224 × 224 and 384 × 384, based on the Swin Transformer-L model, and identified 8 categories of mosquito identification accuracy differences. These test results are shown in Table 2. When using an image size of 224 × 224 pixels, the batch_size parameter was set to 16, and when using an image size of 384 × 384 pixels, the batch_size parameter was set to 4; under these conditions, the proportion of utilized video memory accounted for 67%, as shown in Eq. 4, and this was consistent with the description of the relationship between the size of self-attentive operations during the operation of the Swin Transformer model when 384 × 384 pixels images were used. The time required for the Transformer-L model to complete all the training sessions was excessive, reaching 126 h and even exceeding the 124 h required by the YOLOv5 model, which was found to require the highest computation time during the training process in this work. Long-term training process could more fully reflect the performance differences between models. Fortunately and actually, the response speed of the model will not be affected by the training time. Compared to the accuracy of 98.2% obtained for 224 × 224 inputs, the 384 × 384 input image size derived based on the Swin Transformer-L model provided a higher mosquito species identification accuracy of 99.04%, representing an improvement of 0.84%.$$Omega ({text{W}} – {text{MSA}}) = 4{text{HWC}}^{2} + 2{text{M}}^{2} {text{HWC}}$$
(1)
Table 2 Comparison of recognition accuracy for different input image sizes.Full size tableVisualizing and understanding the Swin MSI modelsTo investigate the differences in the attentional features utilized by the Swin MSI and taxonomists for mosquito species identification, we applied the Grad-CAM method to visualize the Swin MSI attentional areas on mosquitoes at different stages. Because the Swin Transformer has different attentional ranges among its multi-head self-attention steps in different stages, different attentional weights can be found on different mosquito positions. In stage 1, the feature dimension of each patch was 4 × 4 × C, thus enabling the Swin Transformer’s multi-head self-attention mechanism to give more attention to the detailed parts of the mosquitoes, such as their legs, wings, antennae, and pronota. In stage 2, the feature dimension of each patch was 8 × 8 × 2C, enabling the Swin Transformer’s multi-head self-attention mechanism to focus on the bodies of the mosquitoes, such as their heads, thoraces, and abdomens. In stage 3, when the feature dimension of each patch was 16 × 16 × 4C, the Swin Transformer’s multi-head self-attention mechanism could focus on most regions of the mosquito, thus forming a global overall attention mechanism for each mosquito (Fig. 5). This attentional focus process is essentially the same as the process used by taxonomists when classifying mosquito morphology, changing from details to localities to the whole mosquito.Figure 5Attention visualization of representative mosquitoes of the genera Ae., Cx., An., Armigeres, Coquillettidia and Mansonia. This is a visualization for identifying the regions in the image that can explain the classification progress. Images of Toxorhynchites contain only males, with obvious differences in morphological characteristics, are not shown.Full size imageAe. aegypti is widely distributed in tropical and subtropical regions around the world and transmits Zika, dengue and yellow fever. A pair of long-stalked sickle-shaped white spots on both shoulder sides of the mesoscutum, with a pair of longitudinal stripes running through the whole mesotergum, is the most important morphological identification feature of this species. This feature was the deepest section in the attention visualization, indicating that the Swin MSI model also recognized it as the principal distinguishing feature. In addition, the abdominal tergum of A. aegypti is black and segments II-VII have lateral silvery white spots and basal white bands; the model also focused on these areas.Cx. triraeniorhynchus is the main vector of Japanese encephalitis; this mosquito has a small body size, a distinctive white ring on the proboscis (its most distinctive morphological feature), and a peppery color on its whole body. Similarly, the model constructed herein focused on both the head and abdominal regions of this species.An. sinensis is the top vector of malaria in China and has no more than three white spots on its anterior wing margin and a distinct white spot on its marginal V5.2 fringe; this feature was observed in Stage 2, at which time the modelstrongly focused on the corresponding area.The most obvious feature of Armigeres subalbatus is the lateral flattening and slightly downward curving of its proboscis; the observation of the attention visualization revealed that the constructed model focused on these regions from Stage 1 to Stage 3. The mesoscutum and abdominal tergum were not critical and were less important for identification than the proboscis, and the attention visualization results correspondingly show that the neural network focused less on these features.Coquillettidia ochracea belongs to the Coquillettidia genus and is golden yellow all over its body, with the most pronounced abdomen among the analyzed species. The model showed a consistent morphological taxonomic focus on the abdomen of this species.Mansonia uniformis is a vector of Malayan filariasis. The abdominal tergum of this species is dark brown, and its abdominal segments II-VII have yellow terminal bands and lateral white spots, which are more obvious than the dark brown feature on proboscis. Through the attention visualization, we determined that the Swin MSI model was more concerned with the abdominal region features than with the proboscis features.Subspecies-level identification tests of mosquitos in the Culex pipiens ComplexFine-grained image classification has been the focus of extensive research in the field of computer vision25,26. Based on the test set (containing 270 images) constructed herein for three subspecies of the Cx. pipiens Complex, the subspecies and sex identification accuracies were 100% when the Swin MSI model was used.The morphological characteristics of Cx. pipiens quinquefasciatus, Cx. pipiens pallens, and Cx. pipiens molestus within the Cx. pipiens Complex are almost indistinguishable, but their host preferences, self-fertility properties, breeding environments, and stagnation overwintering strategies are very different27. Among the existing features available for morphological classification, the stripes on the abdominal tergum of Cx. pipiens quinquefasciatus are usually inverted triangles and are not connected with the pleurosternums, while those of Cx. pipiens pallens are rectangular and are connected with the pleurosternums. Cx. pipiens molestus is morphologically more similar to Cx. pipiens pallens as an ecological subspecies of the Cx. pipiens Complex. However, taxonomists do not recommend using the unstable feature mentioned above as the main taxonomic feature for differentiation. By analyzing the attention visualization results of these three subspecies (last three rows on Fig. 5), we found that the neural networks of Cx. pipiens quinquefasciatus, Cx. pipiens pallens, and Cx. pipiens molestus still focused on the abdominal regions, as shown in dark red. The area of focus of these neural networks differ from that of the human eye, and the results of this study suggest that the Swin MSI model can detect finely granular features among these three mosquito subspecies that are indistinguishable to the naked human eye.Novel mosquito classification attributionAfter we performed a confidence check on the successfully identified mosquito images in the dataset, the lowest confidence value was found to be 85%. A higher confidence threshold mean stricter evaluation criteria, which can better reflect the powerful performance of the model. Therefore, 0.85 was set as the confidence threshold when judging novel mosquitoes. When identifying 10 unknown mosquito species, the highest derived species confidence level was below 85%; when the results were output to the genus level (Fig. 1d), the average probability of obtaining a correct judgment was 96.26%accuracy and 98.09% F1-score (Table 3). The images tested as novel Ae., Cx. and An. mosquito were from Minakshi and Couret et al.28,29.Table 3 Probability of correct attribution of novel species.Full size table More