For the last six months we have been trying to get Culex mosquitoes to breed in the lab so we can establish stable lab populations isolated from wild Hawaiian Culex.  As mosquitoes go, Culex are notoriously difficult to rise in the lab.  (In contrast, Aedes albopictus, the "tiger mosquito," are comparatively easy, almost trivial, to raise.)  We tried lots of approaches the past six months.  We caught wild larvae and brought them into the lab to raise.  We were quickly able to get the larvae to live but we could not get the adults to feed.   Then we figured that out but they would die quickly, after a couple days.  It took us a long time to troubleshoot that but we seem to have finally hit on the trick.  ...then we could not get them to mate and lay eggs.  We brought in egg rafts from the wild (Culex lay their eggs in a floating cluster called an egg raft) to drive the numbers in the cage up but nothing seemed to work...  A large part of my recent trip to NCSU last month was to ask for advice on how to raise Culex.  We incorporated this with some new things we were able to come up with and it looks like it is finally paying off!  I am not putting all the details here (although that is my first impulse) because we are planning to publish the new tricks we discovered as a methods paper.  Part of the frustration along the way is that we want to ultimately be able to genetically modify the mosquitoes; but this is useless if we can't maintain the modification for more than a single generation.  Now that we have complete lab generation cycles we can allow the mosquitoes to adapt to the lab for a few generations to optimize everything before starting genetic modifications with microinjections of plasmids.

Long story short, we have our first egg rafts from lab reared mosquitoes today!  This morning it was one and now we have two!  They are normal size like wild rafts.  They should hatch in the next 24 hours...