Papaya (Carica Papaya) Seed Extract and Its Effect on Mosquito (Culicidae)

Abstract

INTRODUCTION

Mosquitoes commonly bring serious and dangerous problem in everyone's health. The best thing to control mosquitoes is to spray insecticides in our place but synthetic insecticides may cause bad effects in our environment and other organisms because of its chemicals. Thus, making insecticide out of organic components could be a good alternative. Hence, the research study was conducted to determine the insecticidal effect of papaya seed extract against mosquitoes.

METHODS

In able to get the mortality effect of the extract on mosquito, the papaya seeds underwent crude extraction. A total of three set-ups were used for the experiment, each set-up was composed of two plastic cup containers connected by a straw with nine mosquitoes. Two of the set-ups received the treatments wherein one was sprayed with the papaya seed extract and the other by a commercial product, while the last plastic cup container served as the negative control group that will confirm the ability of the treatments in killing the mosquitoes. The set-ups were observed three times with a five-minute interval.

RESULTS

The average number of mosquitoes died in three trials of papaya seed extract was 9/9 and as for the commercial brand was 6/9. In order to analyze the number of mortality of mosquitoes, t-test of independent samples was utilized to compare the data gathered in Papaya Seed Extract and Commercial Product. The computed t-value was 0.71 under the critical value of 2.77 that revealed there is no significant difference between papaya seed extract and the commercial product. Qualitatively, common effects in mosquito such as lesser activity, dizziness and unconsciousness were observed in both treatments but not in the negative control.

DISCUSSIONS

Descriptively, the papaya seed extract is more effective than the commercial product since the total number of mortality by the former is greater than the latter. However, through the statistical analysis conducted, the papaya seed extract and commercial insecticide are just comparable in terms of its ability to kill mosquito. With these results, it can be concluded that the papaya seed extract can be an alternative insecticide as it possesses the ability to kill mosquitoes.