Evaluation of four bed bug traps with attractant augmentation for capturing brown dog ticks, Rhipicephalus sanguineus (Latreille)

The brown dog tick can be a serious indoor pest due to its unique ability to complete its lifecycle indoors.  A single engorged and fertilized female tick can oviposit around 4,000 eggs, allowing indoor establishment to be rapid and easy to miss.  Acaricide treatment is currently the primary method of control, but can be costly and can lead to the development of acaricide resistance in the tick populations.  Traps of various designs are commonly used to help monitor and manage populations of indoor pests, such as cockroaches and bed bugs, but there are currently no commercially-available traps for use with brown dog tick infestations.  This study included a comparison of four commercially-available bed bug traps (NightWatch™, Bed Bug Beacon™, ClimbUp®, and Verifi™) with regard to their efficacy in capturing brown dog ticks using CO₂ as an attractant.  Thereafter, the most effective and practical-to-use trap was evaluated using individual attractant chemicals including 1-octen-3-ol, hexanoic acid, and methyl salicylate.  Each chemical was tested with and without CO₂ augmentation, and heat was also tested as a stand-alone attractant.  Clear differences in the efficacy of the four traps were demonstrated.  For the second study, the numbers of ticks caught for all attractant combinations were significantly higher when CO₂ was included than when chemicals were used alone.  These results suggest that bed bug traps may be useful in brown dog tick monitoring, and CO₂ will likely be an important component of a trapping system employed in the future.