Fig. 1

Mortality of bed bugs that fed on chickens treated with fluralaner and the concentration of fluralaner in chicken blood during 28 days after treatment. a Bed bug mortality. Six chickens were treated with 0.5 mg/kg body mass on day 0 and again on day 7 (T2, Treatment 2). Up to 15 bed bugs were fed on each bird at each time point, with each time point represented by 78–87 bed bugs (out of a maximum of 90 bed bugs) that fed to repletion. A linear mixed model (based on restricted maximum likelihood) was conducted within each experiment followed by Tukey’s honestly significant difference test to separate means (represented within box plots by X). Means with different lowercase letters (above box plots) are significantly different at α = 0.05. b Fluralaner concentration in chicken blood (note log-scale). Blood from 11 chickens was collected from the 6 chickens used in a and 5 chickens that were not exposed to bed bugs. The LOQ was 5 ng/ml. The LC₅₀ (15.3 ng/ml) and LC₉₀ (38.6 ng/ml) lines were derived from dose–response curves of fluralaner-supplemented blood fed to bed bugs in artificial feeders [10]