A modified tire ovitrap for monitoring Aedes albopictus in the field.

Keyword Index: Aedes albopictus, tire trap description, surveillance tool, Dominican Republic. With the introduction of Aedes albopictus (Skuse) into the Americas from southeast Asia and Japan (Hawley 1988), many surveillance tools originally used for Aedes aegypti Linn. programs were adopted to monitor the new invading species. In the continental U.S.A., conventional ovitraps (Fay and Eliason 1966) and modified ovitraps using seed germination paper substrates (Steinly et al. 1991) have been used for collecting eggs. However, tire casing traps were used for collecting aquatic immature stages (Niebylski and Craig 1994) while the New Jersey Light traps, CDC light traps, Duplex cone, Bi-directional Fay and Omni-directional traps were used for collecting adult Ae. albopictus (Jensen et al. 1994, Crans et al.1996). In the rest of the Americas, tire surveys (larval surveys) and ovitraps have been used in Mexico (IbañezBernal and Martínez-Campos 1994), larvitraps in Cuba (Broche and Borja 1999), larval surveys in Guatemala (Ogata and Lopez-Samoyoa 1996), and larval surveys in Argentina (Rossi et al. 1999) have been used to monitor the immature stages of the invading populations of Ae. albopictus. In the Dominican Republic, Ae. albopictus was first discovered in 1993 (Pena 1993). To monitor their infestation level, we used a motor bicycle tire trap that exploited the mosquito preference for used tires. This paper describes a modified tire trap device developed to monitor the oviposition behavior of Ae. albopictus and facilitate the inspection and collection of immature stages in the field.