Assessment Of Floral-Derived Aromatic Compounds And Sugar Lures To Capture Male And Female Aedes Aegypti (diptera: Culicidae)

Abstract The viruses transmitted by Aedes aegypti, including dengue and Zika viruses, are rapidly expanding in geographic range and as a threat to public health. In response, control programs are increasingly turning to the use of sterile insect techniques resulting in a need to trap male Ae. aegypti in order to monitor the efficacy of the intervention. However, there is a lack of effective and cheap methods for trapping males. We attempted to exploit the male physiological need to obtain energy from sugar feeding in order lure the mosquitoes into a passive trap. We tested promising aromatic and sugar lures identified in the literature in order to determine whether small-scale attraction is indicative of success in larger scale trapping. First, all five lures were compared against a water control in an attraction assay using males and females (nulliparous and gravid). Guava mango was indicated to be the most promising lure among males, although it did not perform statistically significantly better than the water control (P=0.08). Next, the number of mosquitoes captured by a Gravid Aedes Trap (GAT) treated with guava mango was compared to the number captured by a control GAT. No statistical difference in the number of mosquitoes captured was detected among males (P=0.45), nulliparous females (P=0.67), or gravid females (P=0.47). Our findings suggest that the use of the floral-derived aromatic compounds and sugar mixtures that have been identified in the literature is not an effective lure by which to capture Ae. aegypti in the GAT. Future trapping efforts would likely be more successful if focused on more promising methods for male capture