Mosquitoes, mosquitoes and more mosquitoes

Most of the time I can keep a smile when people tell me they have killed this or that “pest.” But I have to tell you, I really lost my cool one evening just after I gave what I thought was a balanced, ecological pitch to a group of Sunriver home-owners about the values of insects — especially gnats, mosquitoes and other teeny-tiny buzzers.

A woman elbowed through the group of people I was talking with, pushed her face into mine, and grumbled “You don’t know what you’re talking about, Mr. Naturalist. There is no place on this earth for mosquitoes and gnats. They bite, spread disease and make my life miserable!” Then she finished her harangue with the question I had just tried to answer in the last hour of pictures and dialogue: “What good are the damn things…?”

In frustration, I stuck my face in hers and shouted, “And what good are you?” I can’t say for sure, but I thought I heard someone clap…

Mosquitoes are food to swallows, nighthawks, frogs, fish, dragonflies, bats, and just about every insect-eater in the voracious family of Nature. Without mosquitoes, swallows would be hard-pressed to feed their ravenous nestlings. Please, have patience with the buzzers that pester you and at times make life a bit more than unpleasant; they fit into nature’s big picture.

Mosquitoes have been the chief vectors in the spreading of yellow fever, malaria and other nasty diseases. However, through intensive efforts of health departments and epidemiologists, yellow fever and malaria have almost been eliminated in the U.S.

When men infected with yellow fever and malaria returned to the U.S. after working on the Panama Canal, disease spread like wildfire, especially in the southwest where mosquitoes were abundant year-round.

However, Dr. Charles Campbell, head bacteriologist for the city of San Antonio, Texas in 1919 discovered how to establish bats in order to control disease-carrying mosquitoes.

His work led him to construct the “Campbell Bat House” and colonize bats as I do bees. For his notable discovery, he was nominated for the Nobel Prize for Medicine by the State of Texas on February 10, 1919. He made a lot of money selling his bat houses and guano and published a neat book, “Bats, Mosquitoes and Dollars.”

Because of nature’s resilience and the mechanisms that drive organisms to explore new habitat, two Asian mosquitoes, Aedes albopictus, and Aedes japonicus, are becoming another threat to spreading Eastern Equine Encephalomyelitis in the U.S. Until its discovery in Houston, Texas, in August 1985, albopictus was unknown in the New World. Now it is believed to be established in 866 counties in 26 states in the continental U.S.

Mother Nature looks out for her own.

Then there is the problem with mosquito-born West Nile Virus. According to research carried out by a team of U.S. scientists, West Nile may kill people in North America more often than in Europe because bird-biting U.S. mosquitoes, Culex pipiens, a major carrier of West Nile, have formed a hybrid with those with a taste for human flesh.

Another mosquito-borne disease that makes the headlines every summer around here is Western Equine Encephalitis. Control of mosquitoes that spread this deadly disease can range from $21,000 for transiently infected individuals to $3 million for severely infected individuals, while insecticide applications can cost as much as $1.4 million depending on the size of area treated.

The awful reality of these so-called “control” measures is that if they don’t kill 100 percent of the mosquitoes, the survivors will breed super mosquitoes that will require even stronger stuff to kill them.

For those of you who have sat by the campfire swatting mosquitoes there is also the Frustration Index, a difficult factor to measure in dollars. I don’t know about you, but I just plain don’t enjoy them, but will tolerate them because I understand that our natural world of give and take couldn’t operate as well as it does without them.

So what to do? Use mosquito repellent? You bet, BUT be careful and check with your physician before you spread the stuff all over your body, or in clothing. You may be allergic to it.

Eliminate mosquito breeding sites? You bet! Do not allow water to stand in those old tires, make sure cans are empty, and irrigate carefully; it only takes 12 days for some mosquitoes to grow from egg to adult.

You might even want to put up a bat house. If so, send me an email: [email protected], and I’ll send you the plans.

Have a great summer.