Phil Goodman, Commissioner of District Two and board chair of Florida Keys Mosquito Control District, joined Good Morning Keys on KeysTalk 96.9/102.5FM this morning to talk about mosquitoes.
The Florida Keys Mosquito Control District has been quite busy this year.
Goodman said, “In fact, May was probably the worst May that we’ve had since 2012. We experienced something similar back in 2012 but, and it wasn’t just in the Keys. Most of Florida experienced the same thing, and especially the coastal areas in Florida, and a lot of it was because of extremely high tides in the spring and opening up a lot of new breeding sites. We’ve got most of these under control now. We’re starting in the middle of June now with our regular season, more or less, so things should get back to normal. We’ve had a lot of wind particularly in the Upper Keys coming in from the Everglades. So a lot of mosquitoes being blown in from the Everglades, which we’ve had several aerial adulticide missions there, and many truck missions and many larvacide missions. We’re getting control of it and ready for the regular daily rains or weekly rains whatever we have here that’s normal, and the season will be more or less as usual, I think going forward.”
It’s the hatching eggs that are the problems.
Goodman said, “That’s what we experienced, really, in most of May, was the first rains of the spring, where you’ve got the mosquitoes have been laying eggs all year long, but there’s hasn’t been much rain or much high tide, really, in the winter. So these eggs just lie dormant, and they just continue to accumulate and multiply. Then when the first ones in the spring, for several rains and high tides, you get extremely large numbers of hatches, which is normal. This year seemed to be worse than usual, though, and so we really, we broke all records in May of some of our treatments. We treated in May like we normally would in July or August. So this started off as a really rough year, but hopefully now things will calm down a little bit and get more of a normal cycle, as long as we can keep up with our larvaciding in advance and topping it off with the adulticiding, we hope we’ll have a more normal season for the rest of the year.”
Mosquito borne diseases are a real worry, but the Keys don’t have any mosquito diseases at the moment.
Goodman said, “Right now, we are mosquito borne disease free in the Keys, and we were working hard to keep it that way. It’s not the same for Florida. Of course, it’s early in the year. Florida specs we’ve seen imported cases of malaria and dengue fever in many parts of Florida, none in the Keys right now and some areas of Florida are more concerned with malaria than dengue. In the south of Florida, dengue fever is the one that we’re concerned with. We’re not too concerned about malaria because we don’t have too many of the Anopheles mosquitoes here, and the ones that we have we can control chemically, but with the Aedes aegypti that carries Dengue fever, this mosquito has become resistant to our better chemicals. There are no really good vaccines for dengue fever and no good therapeutics. So the only way to control this virus is to control the mosquito. Right now we don’t have the chemistry working as good as we need it, which is why we’re looking at a lot of new technologies.”
One of those technologies is the Wolbachia pilot program, which has been launched in the Upper and Middle Keys.
Goodman aid, “Today starts really our third week of releases. We have three 20 acre sites that we are testing. Two are in the Upper Keys. One is in the Middle Keys. We’re releasing twice a week. We are releasing on Tuesdays and Fridays. We’ll be releasing for over the five month period from June through October, about 1.8 million sterile Aedes aegypti mosquitoes that will be released in these areas, and we’ll monitoring, we’re trapping eggs. We’re trapping mosquitoes. We’re doing a lot of work that will be analyzing the results, and by the end of the season, when we finish this, we should have enough statistical data to determine how significant the improvement is. We’ll probably see improvement from week to week, or month to month, some trends, at least with what we’re hoping but we don’t want to draw any conclusions until the complete pilot project is over for this year, and we’re able to look at all the data. So a lot of work, and a lot of work went into selecting the sites, and we’ve identified at least 25 hot spots in the Florida Keys for the Aedes aegypti mosquito. Right now, we had a bad May that was mainly salt marsh mosquitoes, which are just a nuisance mosquitoes. But now we’re seeing the numbers of Aedes aegypti as we get into June, those numbers are rising. It’s a very aggressive program. We have to control that mosquito, and we’ve been able to do a really good job. Sometimes the numbers get up, but we’re able to knock them down with special larvicides and still, some of the pesticides are somewhat effective, but long term, we need something like Wolbachia with a sterile insect. The way it works, we’re releasing these Wolbachia. It is a bacteria that’s implanted into the male Aedes aegypti mosquito, which, when it mates with a female, it’s really sterile and there’s no offspring. So you continue to release these males, they continue to mate with the females, and the adult population of the mosquitoes really drops. So after two or three months, you can see significant drop. We’re hopeful to see a 90% drop. That’s what we’ve seen before with some of these other trials, like with Oxitec. So we’re hoping Wolbachia will give us some good results. This is going to be a long term program, though to really figure out how best to use this in the Keys and where to use it, but we’re starting now, and we’ll keep you apprised of what we find.”
There are different regulations for mosquito control throughout the Keys.
Goodman said, “We are heavily regulated operations, what we spray, when we spray, how much we spray, all of these things are regulated and controlled. In the Florida Keys, we have a lot of government protected land, some by the federal government, some state government. There’s over 100 of these protected areas in the Keys and really, basically on just about every Key, and this determines how much we can control mosquitoes on these areas, how close you live to a protected area. We work with the Department of Environmental Protection at the state level, as well as Fish and Wildlife and Department of Agriculture at the state level, and also US Fish and Wildlife at the federal level. Each each of those areas, parks and protected lands, has their own manager. We have to negotiate with that manager how much we can control. People ask me, I live on this Key, but I go to this Key a lot, and mosquitoes are much easier, there’s less of them in this area than in another. Why is this happening? This is a big reason. There’s other reasons too, mangroves and how much vegetation you have, and rainfall and wind and a lot of things determine how many mosquitoes you have. The federal and state protected lands, we’re regulated to when our inspectors go out in some areas, if they find five mosquitoes count within a minute that land on them, we can spray. In other areas, it’s 35 and it’s all in between, so big differences there that we’re regulated, that we can control. But the good news is the great equalizer in all this is the fact that we have really been able to control mosquitoes, mostly with larvicide, with a new larvicide that really came out about 25 years ago that we get better at each year, and this is probably 80% of what we do is larvicide, and we’re not regulated on that. We can more or less spray that everywhere. So that really helps us control this. But the state and federal control lands are a big variable for us and for the population here.”
The state budget was approved by the legislature last night and hopefully it’ll be good for mosquito control.
Goodman said, “It was and mosquito control, we did have some some good news there. We’re mostly funded by local ad valorem taxes. In fact, in the Florida Keys, that’s really just about 100% of our funding. We don’t really get state money, but because in the mosquito control world, there’s three classes of mosquito control, and we’re in the larger category, and we don’t qualify for state funds. What happens is the state funds really go to the smaller programs, smaller county programs, some of them have really not enough money to control mosquitoes. So we’ve had all of this money because it helps all of us. If Miami Dade has bad mosquito problems, it hurts us in the Keys eventually. These mosquitoes, they tend to move around, and so we want to control them in all of Florida. So Florida did increase the amount of money going to these small programs this year in their budget, which is really good news, because some of them really have a difficult time getting at the funds to control the mosquitoes in their area. Tourism is the big industry here, and we want to be sure that that we stay at a top tourist destination. I know we’ve got big traffic problems in the Keys, maybe as a result, but tourism for this whole state is a very important source of our economic well being. So we’re doing everything we hand can to not hurt it.”
Mosquitoes also can bite our pets.
Goodman aid, “Mosquitoes are really the source of heart worm in dogs and cats. So getting bit by, not just Aedes aegypti, but a number of the types that we have, the salt marsh mosquito, so any pet that you have in the Keys really needs to be protected against heartworm. That is certainly a big problem. We work hard to control all of them. They bite animals. In fact, there’s some some species that would just as soon bite a cat or a dog or an iguana or a chicken, as a human. But the Aedes aegypti prefers humans, and this is one of the reasons why it’s such an important vector for mosquito borne disease for humans, because it prefers to bite humans, because only females bite, and they all need blood, the protein in blood to develop their eggs. So the females bite and they need blood to develop their eggs. Most of them don’t care where the blood comes from, but Aedes aegypti prefers human blood. So this is why it’s such an important vector, and one that we need to really control as much as we can.
You can always contact mosquito control.
Goodman said, “If you need a service call, to place a service call with mosquito control, you can do it on the website or on our app, and somebody will come out the same day, or the latest the next day, to inspect your property. That’s very important, to go around your property and dump out any standing water, because that’s where these Aedes aegypti breed around our homes. Water around in our plants and when it rains, if the water is accumulating on the ground, this is where they breed. So if you can dump out that, this helps us a lot. We had our board meeting last week, and we’ve started our budget process, which will go through September, but we have started it, and I’ll keep you informed how we’re coming along on that in future discussions. Mosquito control is a prerequisite for just about everything that happens in the Keys, tourism, you’re looking at property values, looking at your residents, people like to live and play. It’s outdoor living and we certainly have mosquitoes. Mosquito control is not perfect. We know we’re working to get better, but it’s always changing, but we do appreciate very much the support from the community.
For more information, click here: https://www.keysmosquito.org/