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Member Symposium

Plant-Insect Ecosystems

Medical, Urban, and Veterinary Entomology

The Sterile Insect Technique: Innovations, Challenges, and Future Directions

Lab-reared Aedes aegypti adults can quickly achieve similar cold hardiness to wild populations with 3 days of outdoor acclimation: Implications for mosquito release programs

Tuesday, November 12, 2024
10:51 AM – 11:09 AM MST
Location: Phoenix Convention Center, 131 A
Oral Presentation
SIT programs are often most effective when they begin releases before pest populations rise, typically in the spring when temperatures may be low. The problem is that males reared under high and stable laboratory temperatures may not perform well in the field under temperatures that fluctuate daily between warm in the afternoon and cold in the early morning. One potential solution is to acclimate sterile males under fluctuating thermal regimes prior to field release. The objectives of this study were to determine the extent to which lab reared Aedes aegypti can acclimate to field environmental temperatures over 3 or 7 days across seasons, compare the CTmin values of outdoor acclimated lab-reared mosquito to wild mosquitoes in an equivalent time period, and identify which environmental temperature metrics are most closely associated with changes in CTmin. We collected wild male Ae. aegypti in Gainesville FL throughout the year and showed that males had lower CTmin in spring and fall than in the summer, whereas lab-reared males had a stable CTmin throughout the year. We find that 3-days of exposure to natural thermal fluctuations is sufficient to acclimate lab-reared males to have equivalent low CTmin as wild-caught males. These data suggest future avenues for using acclimation treatments to improve the early season performance of lab-reared sterile male Ae. aegypti in SIT programs.