Monitoring tsetse fly populations.:II. The effect of climate on trap catches of Glossina pallidipes

Abstract

In Part I it was shown that the sampling distribution of trap catches of tsetse flies, Glossina pallidipes Austen, at Nguruman, Kenya, using unbaited biconical traps follows a Poisson distribution. In this paper we examine the effect of humidity and temperature on day-to-day and seasonal variations in the trap catches. It is shown that the seasonal variation is significantly correlated with maximum daily temperature, the catches increasing with temperature when the maximum temperature is below 34 degrees C and decreasing with temperature when it is above 34 degrees C. The correlation between trap catches and relative humidity is not as good as the correlation with the maximum temperature, and the two together do not improve the fit to the trap catches. The day-to-day variation is significantly greater than the intrinsic variation due to the stochastic nature of the sampling process and for some traps it is correlated with temperature and humidity. An autoregressive model gives a half-life for the decay of departures from the mean of about 1 day and it is suggested that this indicates the movement of flies in response to animal movement or to climatic factors other than temperature or humidity. After removing the temperature dependent part of the seasonal variation and the autoregressive component of the data, the male and female catches are still significantly correlated.