Does Asian tiger mosquito (Diptera: Culicidae) avoid zebra stripe?

Abstract

e role of zebra stripes is considered to be defensing from blood sucking by insects, such as tsetse ies and tabanid ies, those perform actively host-seeking ight. Aedes albopictus is opportunistically blood sucker, so, the reaction to zebra stripes may be di erent from such ies. us, we investigated the reaction of A. albopictus to the rugs of three color patterns, black, white, and zebra stripes. During the sunny days on August and September, 2019 with three di erent times in a day (morning, daytime, and evening), we counted the number of mosquitoes landed on the rugs on human decoy at a park in Tokyo. Signi cant di erence (p<0.05) was found in the total number of mosquitoes landed on the three types of rugs, while no signi cant di erence (p>0.05) was found in the numbers of mosquitoes landed on the rugs at each observation time. e number of A. albopictus which landed on the black-colored rug was two times more than that of a mosquito ying around the face of human decoy, while those on the rugs of white color and zebra stripes were a half and only 3% of those ying around the face of human decoy, respectively. e lured A. albopictus landed smoothly on the black rug, but the landings were not smooth on the zebra-striped rug. It was revealed that A. albopictus avoids zebra stripes as same as tsetse ies and tabanid ies.