A New Technique for Rearing Individual Culicoides Larvae (Diptera: Ceratopogonidae)

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Abstract
One major difficulty in assigning larval Culicoides to species, which are defined on the basis of adult features, has been the absence of a method of rearing individual larvae. This has been overcome, in part, by describing only larvae collected from habitats known by other means to contain only 1 species of Culicoides, e.g., C. furens, C. melleus (Wirth, 1952, Fla. Ent. 35: 91–100); C. furens, C. hoffmani (Linley & Kettle, 1964, Ann. Mag. Nat. Hist. 7: 129–49); C. arboricola (Linley, 1970, J. Med. Ent. 7: 717–21). Alternatively, larvae removed from field material have been grouped accordingly to certain criteria, such as head size and color, thoracic pigmentation and pattern, and returned to small amounts of source material for rearing. The latter may already contain Culicoides larvae, thus complicating identification. However, this procedure was used successfully to identify 28 species of British Culicoides (Kettle & Lawson, 1952, Bull. Ent. Res. 43: 421–67). Sterilizing the rearing material before adding Culicoides larvae was ineffective, presumably because it killed all organisms on which the larvae might be feeding and encouraged molds.

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