The poultry red mite (PRM), Dermanyssus gallinae (De Geer, 1778) (Acari: Dermanyssidae), is well known as the most harmful blood sucking ectoparasite in the poultry industry, causing huge economic losses worldwide (Abbas et al., 2014). PRMs can cause skin irritation, anaemia, vascular problems, and even the death of the host (Chauve, 1998; Cosoroaba, 2001; Hobbenaghi et al., 2012). The losses caused by PRM infestation had been increasing in Europe for the past decades, reaching 231 million € from 130 million € per year and was expected to keep increasing (Sigognault Flochlay et al., 2017). More and more studies suggested RPMs can act as a vector for several poultry and mammal pathogens, including zoonotic ones (Cafiero et al., 2019; Schiavone et al., 2022; Sommer et al., 2016). Increasing cases of dermatitis and allergy reactions caused by D. gallinae had been reported, which were regularly misdiagnosed and delayed treatment due to unfamiliarity of the cases by physicians (Cafiero et al., 2008; Collgros et al., 2013). Indeed, some international organizations, such as FAO, OIE and WHO had agreed that the impact of D. gallinae on human health could be fully considered as a One Health issue (Cafiero et al., 2019). Hence, more research on the morphological, reproduction, physiological and biochemical characteristics of the D. gallinae as well as novel control methods were urgently needed (Lee et al., 2002; Li et al., 2020; Xu et al., 2022). For such researches, a reliable source of PRMs is the cornerstone.

To obtain a reliable source of PRMs, a lot of studies had been conducted on the reproduction of D. gallinae in vitro and in vivo (Nunn et al., 2019, 2020; Tucci, 1997). Although in vitro rearing system can successfully rear mites, chick skin, artificial membrane and birds blood were often needed, and generally low number of PRMs was obtained (Arkle et al., 2010; Bruneau et al., 2001). The difficulties of setting up such rearing devices, the unreliability of the system, and high cost limited their widespread use. Our group had established an efficient rearing system of PRMs with chickens as the host (Wang et al., 2018). The number of mites in this rearing system increased by 53.5 times with a high survival rate (94%) of PRMs within six weeks of mite introduction. In practical application under laboratory conditions, we found that the system had some disadvantages due to the fast growth rate of chickens, such as high feed consumption rate, large amount of fecal excrement, repugnant odor of the feeding environment, inconvenient operation and so on. As the chicken ages, their skin hardens and becomes difficult for mites to puncture the skin and suck blood. As a result, the number of mites in the system is reduced and the chickens also have to be replaced with new ones monthly.

Small hosts with low growth rates, such as quails, could probably solve these drawbacks. Quails were domesticated thousands of years ago (Shimakura, 1940), which also had been widely used in scientific research (Ares et al., 2018; Ben-Yisahay et al., 2021). This bird was small with strong disease resistance, small food intake, and low fecal yield (Tsudzukl, 1994). To our knowledge, no PRM's rearing system using quails as the host has been established under laboratory conditions. We used quails as the host to breed mites in present study and compared the effectiveness with the chicken system. This study will provide more methods and options for rearing PRMs under laboratory conditions.