A vocabulary of landscape — a landscape of words
1054 entries
vector
A vector is an organism that carries something from one host to another. Mosquitoes carry malaria, ticks carry Lyme disease, aphids carry plant viruses, and bark beetles carry the fungus that causes Dutch elm disease. The word is also used for pollen and seed: An animal that moves either is a dispersal vector, which is what an ant carrying a seed or a bee carrying pollen is doing.
Etymology
The word is Latin for a carrier or a bearer, from a verb meaning to convey, which also gives English vehicle and convey itself. The mathematical sense, a quantity with both size and direction, comes from the same root by a different path, since a vector carries a point from one place to another.
Notes
Vector-borne relationships are among the most manipulated in nature, because the carried organism benefits from anything that increases contact between vector and host. Several plant viruses change the smell of an infected plant so that more aphids land on it, and there is evidence that malaria parasites alter both the mosquito’s biting behavior and the infected person’s odor.