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Till now, live hosts such as cats or rats must be used routinely to
feed fleas in laboratory. However, it requires lots of labor, time and
space for the maintenance. An artificial blood feeding system modified
from Wade and Georgi(1988) has been developed in this study to
substitute the on-host feeding system. The adult longevity, fecundity
and population parameters were than calculated to evaluate and
determine the appropriate artificial blood feeding system. The results
showed that dried pig blood was better than bovine, feline, and dog
blood. Percent of adult emergence was 45.83%,that of other treatments
were less than 16%. In the artificial feeding system, heparinized
bovine blood and parafilm were used to feed adult fleas. Average egg
production of cat fleas reared by the modified artificial blood feeding
system was 26 eggs per female, adult longevity was 19.27 days. The
population parameters were as follows: net reproduction rate(R0):
28.29; mean generation time(T): 29.09; intrinsic rate of increase(r):
0.1374; and finite rate of increase(λ): 1.147. Where as average egg
production of cat flea on-host feeding was 151 eggs per female,
longevity of female and male fleas were 13.7 and 12.8 days. Its
population parameters were as follows: net reproduction rate(R0):
71.48; mean generation time(T): 27.23; intrinsic rate of increase(r):
0.17; and finite rate of increase(λ): 1.185.
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