petragnani is found only in western Mediterranean region, and is reported to bite only animals; hence, it is not involved in human malaria.

claviger that Giovanni Battista Grassi established the fact that only the female mosquitoes are responsible for transmitting malarial parasite Plasmodium falciparum in humans.

This was for a long period the accepted binomial but soon they realised that Carl Linnaeus had already used the name for the males of Culex pipiens.

[8][9][10] Anopheles claviger is found throughout Palearctic ecozone including Afghanistan, Albania, Armenia, Austria, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Belgium, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Georgia, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Iran, Iraq, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Jordan, Kyrgyzstan, Latvia, Lebanon, Lithuania, Moldova, Netherlands, Norway, Pakistan, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Russia, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Syria, Tajikistan, Turkey, Turkmenistan, Ukraine, United Kingdom, Uzbekistan, Serbia and Montenegro,[6] extending to Middle East, China and Siberia.

petragnani is found only in western Mediterranean including France and Spain, up to Turkey,[12] and absent from beyond.

claviger is distinguished from other related species from its brownish colour and dark palps.

[1] Anopheles claviger adults are most abundant in May and September during which maximum biting on humans takes place.

Unlike other anopheline mosquitoes which deposit their eggs directly on the water surface, female An.

[1] Anopheles claviger was experimentally used to discover the transmission of human malarial parasite P. falciparum, along with the fact that only female anophelines can transmit malaria.

The Italian biologist Giovanni Battista Grassi started investigating different mosquito species in the early 1898 on the basis of mosquito-malaria theory.

Battista performed human experimentation on Abele Sola, who had been a patient for six years in the Hospital of the Holy Spirit (Ospedale di Santo Spirito in Sassia) in Rome.

With mutual consent Sola was bitten by malaria-infected mosquitoes for ten nights, and after few weeks he was down with tertian malaria.

Battista and his colleagues Amico Bignami, Giuseppe Bastianelli and Ettore Marchiafava continued to demonstrate the same experiments in other patients and were always successful.

claviger is the sole mosquito species responsible for human malaria in Italy, and other European countries.

In addition the discovery laid the foundation for prevention of malaria by vector control of mosquitoes.