Hi, I’m Denise Wellings. I’m a study director here at light, which is part of the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine. I’m just gonna give you a very quick tour of one of our insectaries.

So within light, we rear mosquitoes that are both resistant and susceptible. Uh, quickly. LIGHT stands for the Liverpool Insecticide Test and Establishment, and we house a range of mosquitoes. That we use for testing insecticide products on. So these are products that are coming through from sponsors and different chemical companies that they wanna see what the impact of these chemicals could be.

So in this facility, it’s perfectly built, it’s, it’s built for mosquitoes. So we work at very high heat and high humidity. So it’s about 80% of humidity, 28 degrees. Great for the mosquitoes to be housed and staff adjust to it. Um, so. Mosquitoes actually have a, a water lifecycle, um, uh, very similar to tadpoles and frogs and things like that.

So they actually start off in water. After that, they emerge as adults, which are the insects that you are more familiar with. So it’s the adults that we’re actually interested in using in our testing here at light. So to, for mosquitoes to lay eggs, they need to take a blood meal. Uh, and for blood meals, it’s just the females that are taking those blood meals.

’cause it’s just the females that lay eggs. The bloods that we actually get comes from the NHS, but it’s blood that’s deemed not for clinical use. So we’re not taking it off any patients or anything like that to feed mosquitoes. So that is a very quick tour of our establishment. Um, thanks for coming. Um, thanks for letting me show you around.