Fig 1.
(A) Lee County, FL – USA. (B) The straight-line distance from the rearing facility at LCMCD and Captiva Island is around 50 km. (C) The study area on the northwestern tip of Sanibel is a non-intervention area with trapping stations, and the intervention area in Captiva has trapping stations. Trap stations (green and brown circles) comprise one ovitrap and one BGS in both intervention and non-intervention areas. The intervention area was split into three release phases (D-F), showing the respective release points and how our release area grew throughout the study as our capacity to rear more sterile males increases. Maps were created using QGIS version 3.16.9 Hannover, with a background map sourced from OpenStreetMap (Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 license).
Table 1.
Number of female (♀) and male (♂) Aedes aegypti adults and total number of field retrievals (#) from BG-Sentinel traps (deployed for both wild and sterile male mosquito surveillance) and total number of eggs collected from ovitraps, in Captiva and Sanibel Islands, from 2020 to 2022. Traps were deployed in three phases on Captiva (labelled #1 to #3) and continuously on Sanibel. Values represent the total number of individuals or eggs collected per year. Dashes represent time points that did not exist. Before 2020, the data were considered baseline and were included in a separate publication [29].
Fig 2.
Captiva and Sanibel Islands sterile insect technique pilot (SIT) project field collection data showing the mean number of Aedes aegypti sterile marked males released per hectare twice a week (grey bars) and (A) the mean number of collected eggs during Phase #1 in Captiva and the non-intervention area in Sanibel Island, (B) the proportion of the collected eggs that hatched, and (C) the number of adults (males and females) found per trap per day (ATD).
The dashed line indicates the timing of the start of the Phase #1 releases.
Fig 3.
Captiva and Sanibel Islands sterile insect technique pilot (SIT) project field collection data showing the mean number of Aedes aegypti sterile marked males released per hectare twice a week (grey bars) and (A) the mean number of collected eggs during Phase #2 in Captiva and the non-intervention area in Sanibel Island, (B) the proportion of the collected eggs that hatched, and (C) the number of adults (males and females) found per trap per day (ATD).
The dashed line indicates the start of each of the phases’ releases.
Fig 4.
Captiva and Sanibel Islands sterile insect technique pilot (SIT) project field collection data showing the mean number of Aedes aegypti sterile marked males released per hectares twice a week (grey bars) and (A) the mean number of collected eggs during Phase #3 in Captiva and the non-intervention area in Sanibel Island, (B) the proportion of the collected eggs that hatched, and (C) the number of adults (males and females) found per trap per day (ATD).
The dashed line indicates the start of each of the phases’ releases.
Table 2.
Seasonal mean sterile to wild male ratio and recapture – the proportion of sterile males to one wild male recaptured in BGS from 2020 to 2022, with the respective recapture rate.
Fig 5.
Seasonal male ratio—the proportion of sterile males to one wild male recaptured from BGS traps between 2020 and 2021.
The horizontal grey dashed lines represent the literature-recommended interval for SIT to successfully suppress (i.e., between 10:1 and 100:1 sterile:wild males).