306 - A case for looking beyond emergence inhibition

Abstract: A commonly used standard for assessing the effectiveness of insect growth regulators (IGR) like Sumilarv® is to find to the percent of mosquitoes that are unable to emerge from pupae. This is typically performed by collecting pupae from a treated water site and assessing the percent of adults that successfully emerged. Then that number is adjusted for the percent successfully emerging from untreated basins to give an estimate of “emergence inhibition” of a larvicide. While this calculation is informative, challenges like low numbers of pupae can skew results. It also may be difficult to compare results to non-IGR larvicides. Additionally treating multiple basins with an IGR in an area may collectively reduce adult production and subsequent oviposition even at lower levels of control. Thus, a focus solely on emergence inhibition may not capture any reductions of pupae due to effects of wider scale treatments. In this presentation, I present a case to also consider the number of adults emerging from pupae in addition to the percent of adults emerging from pupae.