According to Phil Kaufman, an associate professor and veterinary entomologist at UF's Department of Food and Agricultural Sciences, the discovery will assist mosquito control districts more swiftly detect insects before choices are made to spray.
During the mosquito season, mosquito control districts might set up 50 or more traps in a single night to monitor mosquito numbers. Those in charge of mosquito management, however, do not want to collect mosquitoes needlessly since doing so costs time and money, according to Kaufman. Moths, beetles, and other flies are among those unintentional catches.
In order to find and remove the mosquitoes that need to be identified in order to determine which species are a problem or to test them for West Nile and other viruses, people must sort through all of the moths, beetles, and other insects that are found in the mosquito control district office, according to Kaufman. Their work is made simpler by the absence of non-target insects.
In conjunction with the Anastasia Mosquito Control District, Chun-Xiao Li, a visiting Chinese scientist working in Kaufman's lab, inspected a number of traps on a farm close to Elkton in St. Johns County for the current research. In the fall of 2013, she examined the New Jersey and CDC light traps, which are regarded as conventional techniques, as well as a UV trap, a blacklight trap, and a yellow fluorescent light trap.
While catching the fewest "non-target insects," or insects that are not a part of the monitoring system and that mosquito control officials do not wish to kill, Li discovered that the blacklight trap captured the most mosquitoes. The blacklight trap is similar to the CDC trap, but employs a black light as opposed to the CDC trap's incandescent "white" light, according to Kaufman.
The research was presented in the Florida Entomologist journal's most recent edition.
According to Kaufman, "black lights provide a light that is far more appealing to insects." The wavelengths that just miss the UV spectrum are what we really see in a "black light" or bug zapper light because humans cannot see "UV." Nonetheless, it is fairly obvious to insects, and many of them like it.
The light traps, according to him, effectively capture anything that is small enough to be pulled in as it approaches the mouth at the top of the trap.
