Fig. 9

Species independent separation of age groups using wild-derived mosquitoes. In addition to the Ae. detritus samples used in Fig. 8, samples from four other species and another age class (7–10 days) were introduced, including adult mosquitoes that were kept with or without water or fed sucrose solution. A portion of specimens was killed by freezing, some died due to other reasons shortly before being collected; all were stored at − 20 °C before analysis. PC-LDA achieved separation of the three age groups (1 day, 3–4 days, 7–10 days), as can be seen in the OMB model (based on 100 PCs) (a) as well as the scatterplots (b) and kernel density distributions (c) created in R (based on 95 PCs). An overall 90% of test samples were correctly identified during random forest analysis with group-specific accuracies of 94% for newly emerged specimens (1 day old), 84% for 3–4-day-old mosquitoes and 92% for the 7–10-day-old group (d). Sample numbers per class: 1 day (75), 3–4 days (75), 7–10 days (69)