LAUSR

The sterile insect technique (SIT) is a genetic vector control method whose development primarily depends on the availability of insect strains which can be mass reared with a final objective of releasing sterilised males in a targeted population (Dyck et al. 2005). In mosquitoes, the initial process of mass rearing includes successful colonisation (Benedict et al. 2009) which maintains reproductive and physiological fitness for several generations under artificial insectary conditions. To date several mosquito species have been colonised and methods and procedures to do this are available (Gerberg 1970; Hunt et al. 2005). Despite detailed procedures for mosquito colonisation and rearing, there is no gold standard cage specifically designed for mosquito rearing during laboratory colonisation. There are instead several cages described for continuous breeding of quality mosquitoes; however, few studies have been done to assess or compare the suitability of different cages for rearing mosquitoes under standard insectary environments. In this work we evaluated the suitability of BugDorm-1 insect rearing cages for the rearing of an Anopheles arabiensis strain developed by introgressing a wild-type strain of females with a genetic sexing strain of males as part of a SIT project. The most important parameters to be considered when rearing mosquitoes under caged conditions are their physiological and reproductive fitness (Huho et al. 2007). In this study, adult mortality, insemination rates and fecundity of females as a measure of both physiological and reproductive fitness were compared between adult mosquitoes maintained in 1) commercially available BugDorm-1® cages versus locally modified round buckets (Fig. 1a), 2) between BugDorm-1® cages covered with a black cloth versus an uncovered one (Fig. 1b) and lastly 3) between BugDorm-1® cages containing various densities of adult mosquitoes.