LAUSR

Abstract Blood feeding behavior is crucial in both incriminating a vector in disease transmission and in understanding the mechanism of transmission, too. Blood feeding is a complex behavior that includes many details (begin with landing on host's skin and end with take-off host's skin after feeding). Experiments were designed to monitor such details in Cx. (Cx.) univittatus mosquito, in relation to sugar deprivation time and species of the host. Two-way ANOVA revealed that both host species and sugar deprivation time had significant effects on feeding behavior of Cx. (Cx.) univittatus. Regarding the effect of host species on feeding behavior of Cx. (Cx.) univittatus , human was observed to be more attractive to the mosquito than the other hosts. The deprivation time (24 h) had the highest effect on the blood feeding behavior of Cx. (Cx.) univittatus . Generally, the tow-way ANOVA indicated that the kind of host species had a greater effect on feeding behavior than the sugar deprivation time. The combined effect of interaction between host species and sugar deprivation time showed significance in three cases only (% females landed, time to probing and % fully-engorged females). The combined effect presented its highest value in the case of percentage fully-engorged females. Meanwhile, the least value of the combined effect was in the case of time to full engorgement. These results suggested that Cx. (Cx.) univittatus could play a role in the maintenance of arboviruses within bird and animal populations in Saudi Arabia. Additional studies are needed to complete the figure of vectorial capacity of this mosquito species.