Materials and methods:

To evaluate the effect of three sources of blood feeding: New Zealand rabbit, Egyptian rat and human, on the number of eggs laid and percentage of Aedes aegypti larvae hatching under insectary conditions.

Results:

A statistical significant difference was observed in the average of eggs placed between the three pools of Aedes aegypti females fed different blood sources: rat blood, 671.25 eggs; human blood, 268.14 eggs and rabbit blood, 209.08 eggs (X2= 10.666, P <0.0048); the percentage of hatched larvae did not present statistically significant differences between the three blood sources (X2 = 0.192, p <0.9083).

Conclusions:

In this study we observed that the use of Egyptian rat blood as a source for blood feeding for the production of Aedes aegypti mosquitoes under insectary conditions produced a greater number of eggs in the oviposition when compared to rabbit and human blood.