Low-cost automatic temperature monitoring system with alerts for laboratory rearing units

Monitoring accurately temperature is a key issue in biological studies involving living experimental material. It is especially true for insects which body temperature is mostly controlled by environmental temperature, with profound consequences of a few degrees variation on most physiological processes such as survival, development, fecundity, and mobility. If programmable rearing units can be purchased, it remains important to monitor and store temperature information acquired inside the rearing unit to ensure that observed phenomena are not the result of unintended and not scarily noticeable changes in temperature, and to account for the effect of temperature variation in statistical analysis. As most laboratories involved in insect rearing dispose of a large number of rearing units, the technical solution should meet the monitoring needs while being affordable and adaptable to various experimental designs. For that purpose, we designed a low cost (below 100€) and open source automatic temperature monitoring system for rearing units in laboratory. Key features providing advantage over pre-existing methods include: •Highly configurable temperature monitoring and life-time storage capacity•Email alerts based on configurable user-defined threshold•Automatic configurable reports in the form of dashboards.