Chicken blood provides a suitable meal for the sand fly Lutzomyia longipalpis and does not inhibit Leishmania development in the gut

Table 1 Effects of bloodfeeding on different live hosts on the reproduction of Lu. longipalpis.

	Chicken	Dog	Human
Proportion of flies feeding (%)	88.3	75.8	81.0
Time to engorge (s)	460.8 ± 218.2 (N = 20)	394.3 ± 129.8 (N = 20)	320.1 ± 85.3 (N = 20)*
Egg maturation time (days)	9.3 ± 1.7	9.1 ± 2.1	9.5 ± 2
Number of eggs	64.3 ± 2.2	64.3 ± 2.4	48 ± 1.7*
Post feeding survival (days)	9.8 ± 1.6	10 ± 1.8	10.5 ± 2
Post oviposition survival (days)	0.7 (52.9%)	0.8 (60.7%)	1.0 (61.7%)
Larval hatching time (days)	16.2 ± 2.5	16.2 ± 2.3	16.4 ± 2.6
Total development time (days)	42.7 ± 6.8	42.2 ± 5.4	41.8 ± 5.8
Sex ratio (male:female)	0.48	0.46	0.5
Fertility (eggs:adults)	0.67	0.68	0.75

Values shown are means ± SD of three independent experiments, asterisk denotes significant difference (P ≤ 0.05). For post-oviposition survival, numbers in parentheses represent percentage of flies surviving for at least 24 h. Numbers of insects used were 57 bloodfed on chickens, 54 bloodfed on dogs and 50 bloodfed on human, except for time to engorge where number of flies used are indicated.

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