Performing Department
Entomology and Nematology
Non Technical Summary
This is an ARDP Research-led project with the Diversified IPM Systems as a focus area. In the southeastern US, invasive mosquito species of medical and veterinary importance are increasingly being detected after multiple modes of introduction and dispersal. Our recent surveillance capacity survey in 7 states (Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, and South Carolina) revealed several key obstacles impeding timely recognition and sharing of invasive mosquito species detection and spread in the region. One of the key obstacles identified was limited financial and personnel resources required to deploy an array of different traps. At present, multiple traps are necessary to account for the varying affinities (i.e., host-seeking attraction) of native and invasive mosquito species. This issue especially impacts resource-poor agencies. Thus, the goal of this project is to develop and validate an innovative low-cost mosquito trap system that will significantly improve invasive mosquito surveillance in the southeastern US region. The system will be "value added" as it will be built on a platform that is already established for many native species. We expect that our approach will demonstrate improved species richness using one trap system and thus improve its likely adoption by mosquito control and public health professionals. Our project is aligned with the National IPM Roadmap in reducing potential human health and safety risks from pests by improving pest management strategies.
Animal Health Component
80%
Research Effort Categories
Basic
10%
Applied
80%
Developmental
10%
Goals / Objectives
The goal of this project is to develop and validate an innovative low-cost mosquito trap system that will significantly improve invasive mosquito surveillance in the southeastern US region.The objectives are to:Develop a trap system (based on a classic CDC-light trap) to improve invasive mosquito surveillance while simultaneously sampling native species.Improve invasive species surveillance data sharing through multi-faceted approaches.
Project Methods
Objective 1: Evaluate CDC-light trap with combinations of different sensory cues (chemical, heat, light) to determine species richness and abundance of invasive and native mosquitoes.The project will be conducted in multiple sites within 4 cities - Mobile (AL), Jacksonville (FL), Vero Beach (FL), and Cullowhee (NC). These locations were selected to cover latitude and longitudinal variations in the southeastern USA region. These locations cover urban and sub-urban areas where Aedes invasive species are more likely to come into contact with human hosts. The existing species richness at these sites provide excellent locations to determine the effectiveness of the trap approaches. Collectively, these sites include areas that have on-going arboviral surveillance efforts and documented presence of the invasive species designated as important concerns by our recent survey. By testing in locations varying species composition and temperature and other environmental parameters, we will be able to evaluate and contextualize the effectiveness of different trap and sensory-cue combinations in settings that approximate a variety of habitat in the southeastern US.Three different sensory cues (BG-lure (olfactory), light (visual), and heat (thermal)) will be used combined with the typical CDC light trap with a CO2 lure, that is most commonly used in the southeastern USA.The human sweat odor mimicking BG-Lure® (Biogents AG, Regensburg, Germany) is known to improve the capture of Aedes species as demonstrated by our pilot study in Jacksonville, FL (Dr. Benjamin Allen, City of Jacksonville, FL, personal communication) and other previous studies. Our study allows the evaluation of the system in wider geographic span with varying ecological setting to see if the trend is replicable in other locations.Mosquitoes exhibit different patterns of light attraction/avoidance behaviors that are very different among day-versus night-biting mosquitoes which in both classes of mosquitoes are circadian and light regulated (Baik et al. 2020). By switching the light off at 20-minute interval, the same trap can capture mosquito species that are either attracted to or avoid lights.The BG-Sentinel trap is known to be less effective at Anopheles mosquito capture. However, using a hand warmer typically lasting 10 hours in BG-Sentinel trap significantly improved the capture of Anopheles mosquitoes in trials in Africa (Guindo et al. 2021). We would like to apply this lure to the CDC-light trap system and evaluate if this would improve the capture of Anopheles mosquitoes in our region.Mosquito collection will be carried out between June and October months using the above-mentioned systems when mosquitoes are most prevalent and disease outbreak risks are highest. Date of collection, species, and their counts will be recorded per trap. A balanced Latin-square design will be used for each field assay (minimum of 4 X 4 X 4 combinations) with four trap days (96 hrs), at four rotating local trap sites, with four trap configurations (i.e., different sensory cue combinations). The basic CDC light trap with CO2 lure will be the reference trap for each trial.Surveillance data will be analyzed using spreadsheet and python statsmodels package (Seabold and Perktold 2010). Species diversity using effective number of species metric (Chao et al. 2016) will be compared between lures. The resulting data will be analyzed using a generalized linear mixed model and the results will be contextualized based on comparative species richness and abundance within the study trials, and existing local surveillance (longitudinal) data (Byrd, Killingsworth, and Allen).Objective 2: Improve invasive species surveillance data sharing through multi-facetted approaches.Although there are existing online databases for mosquito species distribution data such as VectorBase (Giraldo-Calderon et al. 2015) and VectorSurv ("VectorSurv" 2023), limitations exist in the adoption of these platforms for sharing and easily accessing data specific to invasive mosquito species. For example, while VectorBase contains mosquito trap surveillance data from multiple mosquito control districts, the purpose of the PopBio abundances data repository is to provide full mosquito trap collections data, and the user must filter for specific species. In addition, because of the large volumes of data needing quality assurance/quality control, the data curation period can sometimes be slow and can take longer than 2 years from data submission to publication (personal communication from Dr. D Norris at Johns Hopkins University), which may miss critical time opportunities for tracking and mitigating invasive species spread if species are in the process of expanding their geographic range.VectorSurv was originally designed to serve the California Mosquito Control Districts for curating their surveillance data in real time. However, in the southern US including states like Florida, have a different set of species needing monitoring and different arboviruses of concern, which have shaped the monitoring and surveillance activities in this region. In addition, the lack of a central data base, such as VectorSurv, in Florida or for the southern region means that the majority of mosquito control surveillance data remains siloed with invasive species records going unreported to the broader community of stakeholders and scientists.Although overall data curation that can be broadly applicable to a wider geographic region, such as the southern US, remains time-consuming and onerous, prioritizing contributions of records for non-native and invasive species provides a manageable balance between initial data submission and sustained maintenance for tracking and communicating distributions for more targeted mitigation approaches. Collectively, this approach will provide data driven information to mosquito control and public health agencies for more precise abatement and control activities, contributing to an optimized IPM approach to tackling invasive species in the southern U.S.The BEACONS dashboard was developed by Campbell (Co-PI) to provide a platform for data reporting and visualization of non-native and invasive species in a timely and efficient manner. The dashboard is delivered through the ArcOnline platform, which provides a user-friendly architecture for linking mosquito records over space and time through an underlying geographic information systems (GIS) software program with continuous licensing provided through the University of Florida. The dashboard provides interactive features through which users can change map extents or information displayed specific to invasive species, including bionomics information and basic descriptive statistics, including number of non-native or invasive species reported in a county, state or region. While the current platform is designed to display presence/absence data to provide baseline information about the current distributions of non-native or invasive species, our maps can be updated easily to include distributions over time, when temporal information is available, and to include abundances captured in traps. In this context, the platform is poised to expand in scope to better meet stakeholder needs and serve as an important resource to stakeholders and scientists, including community members outside the southern U.S. region.We will curate our data generated from the proposed project and share the data using this dashboard. The dashboard will be free and accessible to the public through our Mosquito BEACONS website https://fmel.ifas.ufl.edu/invasivemosquito/.