Journal
JOVE-JOURNAL OF VISUALIZED EXPERIMENTS
Volume -, Issue 140, Pages -Publisher
JOURNAL OF VISUALIZED EXPERIMENTS
DOI: 10.3791/57994
Keywords
Biology; Issue 140; Ticks; feeding; rabbit; jacket; capsule; glue; animal recovery
Categories
Funding
- Laboratory of Excellence, Integrative Biology of Emerging Infectious Diseases (LabEx IBEID), Pasteur Institute
- National Institutes of Health [RO1AI090062]
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The use of live animals in tick research is crucial for a variety of experimental purposes including the maintenance of hard tick colonies in the laboratory. In ticks, all developmental stages (except egg) are hematophagous, and acquiring a blood-meal when attached to their vertebrate hosts is essential for the successful completion of their life cycle. Here we demonstrate a simple method that uses easily openable capsules for feeding of hard ticks on rabbits. The advantages of the proposed method include its simplicity, short duration and most importantly versatile adjustment to the needs of specific experimental requirements. The method makes possible the use of multiple chambers (of various sizes) on the same animal, which permits feeding of multiple stages or different experimental groups while reducing the overall animal requirement. The non-irritating and easily accessible materials used minimizes discomfort to the animals, which can be easily recovered from an experiment and offered for adoption or reused if the ethical protocol allows it.
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