Tag Archives: mosquitoes

Neighborhood Mosquito Watch

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During a run this week I passed an abandoned, 30-gallon aquarium with easily 10,000 larvae doing their thing (wriggling). I came back later, took some photographs (on my Instagram soon if you’re into that), and then dumped it, sending the larvae to their deaths but also releasing a cloud of perhaps 100 newly-eclosed adults. I suspect the aquarium had been there for years, pumping Asian tiger mosquitoes (Aedes albopictus) into the neighborhood. Given the aquarium’s location at the edge of busy parking lot I’m sure that thousands of people have looked at it and thought, “Huh. Looks like an abandoned aquarium full of dirty water. Next to a Christmas tree. I bet there’s a story there!”, and then moved on with their lives.

Abandoned aquarium with mosquitoes

In case you are unsure what an infestation looks like, the next two photographs show what the adults, larvae, and eggs look like. Asian tiger mosquitoes lay eggs singly on the sides of containers or on moist objects floating on the water. They can last over a year as an egg, waiting for conditions to be just right.

Male Asian tiger mosquito (Aedes albopictus) with larvae

Female Asian tiger mosquito (Aedes albopictus) with larvae and eggs

Here’s a sample of the water I pulled from the tank.

But not all the eggs were Aedes albopictus (there are 60 species in PA alone). Here’s a raft of eggs in the aquarium from a different species (Culex sp.). The raft is lodged on a leaf but normally it just floats around until the larvae pop out. Anopheles (another common genus) has eggs that are deposited singly but float with the help of cute little life preservers.

Raft of mosquito eggs

But that’s not all! Yesterday I found a recycling bin behind a church with similar numbers of larvae. Given the amount of leaves decomposing in the bottom I suspect it has been like this for at least the whole summer. Again, it really is strange that nobody did anything about it. It’s right next to a sidewalk that gets lots of traffic (at least on Sundays) and is probably 10′ away from a playground at an infant/toddler daycare center. Poor kids. (I dumped it.)

Recycling bin with stagnant water

Given how much people hate mosquitoes it left me thinking how the public outreach about mosquito control has failed on the most basic level. Everyone should know enough about mosquito biology to know how and where they breed, and everyone should feel empowered to do something. Being proactive is so much better than adopting what I think is the common view, “Well if the mosquitoes get bad enough I’m sure the government will spray insecticides from planes.”

All it would take would be a nicely worded message from a town official to mobilize residents into a mosquito watch. Something like, “If you see mosquito larvae swimming around in a container when you are out walking your dog, please turn the container upside down or alert the owner about it. Thanks.”

Using mosquitoes’ sweet tooth to control Zika transmission

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Now that everyone wants to kill mosquitoes that transmit Zika virus, can somebody please make a transgenic plant that expresses mosquitocidal Bti (Bacillus thuringiensis subsp. israelensis) toxins? Just stick the Bti gene behind a phloem-specific promoter so that the protein gets pumped into the nectar. Then when males and female mosquitoes drink (and almost all do), they die.

White-footed woods mosquito (Psorophora ferox) nectaring on goldenrod flowers.

You could then plant acres of the modified plant nearby towns to protect people from Zika (and anything else transmitted by mosquitoes). The beauty of this method is that you could reduce populations of mosquitoes from an area without spraying, and do so for generations if you modified nectar-producing perennials. I know it’s trendy to dislike GMOs (like vaccines), but I think many people would support them under these circumstances.

And yes, apparently Bti toxins can kill adult mosquitoes (including Aedes aegypti), not just larvae. Klowden and Bulla 1984 demonstrated it, for example. And yes, Aedes aegypti drinks nectar (and probably fruit juice).

Of course, even if somebody had the incentive to make such a plant, it could take a decade to wade through the red tape involved in getting non-regulated status from governments. So if you want to do something today, leave out containers of sugar water (10%) that is laced with Bti (e.g., Mosquito Dunks, which you can buy online or at hardware stores). Maybe add something floral to attract them, too. (A review of olfactory cues suggests that imitation cherry and apple can work. If you don’t have those sitting around, I’d wager a few drops of jasmine flavoring or rose water would work, and those are easily found at local stores.) Even if the Bti doesn’t immediately kill the adult, adults sucking up a big sugar meal can transfer the bacteria to water where they lay eggs, and thus eventually cause the death of any larvae that develop. Note that bees and ants might get interested in your sugar water, but the Bti is completely harmless to them.

And if you don’t want to use Bti, there are plenty of articles on using sugar baits laced with insecticides (e.g., Qualis et al. 2013, Junilla et al. 2015). They really can work: mosquitoes absolutely love sugar and will drink up poisons in the process. These are great if you don’t want to use crop dusters to destroy all insects in the area.

If you have kids and want to entertain them, add food dyes to the sugar bait and then challenge them to find mosquitoes with bellies full of sugar water. For older kids that might be amused by actual science, use two dyes to test attractiveness of two different volatiles (or different sugars). It’s probably rare to recapture one right after a nectar meal, but when distended they reveal gut contents nicely.

FYI, white-footed woods mosquito (Psorophora ferox) doesn’t transmit Zika, but illustrates to the unbelieving that mosquitoes do drink nectar.