Phil Goodman, Florida Keys Mosquito Control District 2 Commissioner and Board Chair, joined Good Morning Keys on KeysTalk 96.9/102.5FM this morning to talk about what’s been going on with the mosquitoes.
The numbers of salt marsh mosquitoes continue to be high in the Keys.
Goodman explained, “It’s been kind of a perfect storm this year, so to speak, for the salt marsh mosquitoes. All of Florida is seeing really record numbers, particularly South Florida. There’s a number of reasons for that. Some of the storms that we’ve had, particularly on the west coast of Florida, but it’s also impacted us over the last few years, we’ve seen this year a tremendous number of new breeding sites. We’ve got hundreds or really thousands of breeding sites in the Keys that we look at regularly and treat and but this year there’s a lot of new ones. Normally we have new ones every year, and we lose some old ones. They stop breeding for a while. This year the numbers have been significantly higher. Some of these breeding sites, it’s kind of like finding a needle in a haystack in some of these areas, when you think about going through some of the salt marshes and the mangroves, particularly the offshore islands, trying to find new breeding sites. We found a lot of them. We’re still looking for some of them. Some of these breeding sites, they can within just a few days, can release millions of mosquitoes into an area. This has been part of our problem. Also, in June, we not able to do a lot of missions. We had about as many missions canceled because of weather than we actually performed. So we really got behind as well. As a result, I think every day now, we’re out doing missions. I think for the last three weekends, we’ve been doing aerial and truck missions. We did missions last night. We’re really working hard to get caught up, and we’ve made a lot of progress in the numbers just in the last few days. With this rain coming now, we’re hoping we can get into more of a seasonal type of application. But so far, it’s typically been atypical season. We’re treating a lot and very effectively. Our normal treatments have been, for the last seven or eight to 10 years, have been predominantly larviciding. We can larvicide and prevent the mosquitoes from becoming adults and flying, but this year, because of some of the missions, we had to cancel, some of them were larviciding. We really saw the downside of not being able to larvicide when we need to. But the numbers are starting to come down, and we will continue to work hard, to try to get relief to a lot of the people in the Keys. Some areas are doing very well. Some areas are not, but we’re getting a handle, I think, on all of them now.”
How is the Wolbachia pilot program going that’s been working to reduce the threat caused by the Aedes aegypti mosquito in the Keys?
Goodman said, “The Wolbachia project is going well. We are releasing every Tuesday and Friday and in three 20 acre sites in the Keys. Two are in the Upper Key, Key Largo area. One is in the Middle Keys. This is going very well. We’re doing a lot of testing as well, collecting a lot of data. This is not to prove that the product works because the EPA approved this process for Wolbachia treatments of mosquitoes last year, went through many years of testing or evaluation at the EPA level after we had already done a lot of tests in the field years prior. So we know that it works. This pilot project is really to start to see how well it will work in the Keys, in coordination with all of our other treatment programs. So we’ll continue that, releasing twice a week probably through October, through the entire season this year. At that time, we’ll be able to do a lot of statistics to see, looking back at the whole season, how well we did. We do see the numbers coming down now, but it’s such a complicated test that we have to wait till we get a lot of data before we can draw any statistically significant conclusions. So far, this is running well and this has the potential to help us long term with controlling disease here in the Florida Keys. Right now, we’ve been able to keep the disease out. The Aedes aegypti mosquito numbers have been relatively low, even though the salt marsh mosquito numbers have been high, we’ve been able to really control the Aedes aegypti so far. But now is the time of year where we’ll start to see the numbers of that increase. So our treatments will continue to accelerate as we go into this the summer season. Right now in Florida, we’re still seeing transmission, basically from visitors coming in, bringing the disease in, we’re seeing a lot of that, not as much local transmission so far this year in Florida as we’ve seen the last two years. But it’s a little bit early in the season for that. This usually starts after the middle of the season, toward the end. So we’re very vigilant, and we’re working hard to keep to the Keys free of disease. So far, successful.”
There is a new program with the National Weather Service working with Florida Keys Mosquito Control District, providing specific information regularly, to use weather as a tool to control mosquitoes.
Goodman said, “We’ve been working closely with the weather service for a long time, because we’re always talking about how the weather impacts us. So we’ve been really working with the National Weather Service to share information on what we see, because we have rain gages all up and down the Keys. We share that information with them, and they have developed a new program, especially for mosquito control, which gives us some advanced warning, like a week’s warning of what they expect the tides to be, the high tides, where in the Keys, also rain projections, locally, depending on the different Keys, also the winds, and also looking at the Tropical Storm situation. So they’re getting this information to us every day now, and so we’re working with them to try to refine this and to make it into something that’s really useful. So far, it has been very useful for us, and it holds a lot of potential. So we really appreciate the partnership with the National Weather Service here and the people there that have really worked to put this program together. I think long term, this will be a big help for us.”
Governor DeSantis signed a new law into effect recently that could help mosquito control.
Goodman explained, “Here in the Florida Keys, we have tremendous number of protected lands from the federal and state government, from the US Fish and Wildlife, Florida Fish and Wildlife, the Department of Agriculture here, and the DEP and others. It’s really hundreds, and each one has a different regulation as far as what we can, when and what, or if we can treat at all. And normally, this has been pretty easy to work with but this year, what’s happened is, in these protected lands, the numbers have gotten really high on the salt marsh mosquitoes in many areas, but it’s not high enough that we can treat. So this is one of the things also that’s impacted the Florida Keys with the salt marsh mosquito and they’re flying in from areas that we can’t treat well. Back in 1986 Governor Graham, at the time he established the coordinating council for mosquito control in the state of Florida. It’s about 18 different people, most of them are from the environmental groups and government agencies, and we had two representatives from mosquito control. They meet four times a year, and they are the final authority on how much treatment we can do in these protected lands. We’ve been wanting to get more representation on there than we have, and the governor signed into law recently giving us two more seats on that, so we’ll have four of the 18 seats, which should help us, because the chemicals that we’re using today in the processes and the treatments are quite different than in 1986 and so we want to be sure that we’re not overly regulated in areas that it doesn’t matter, because in the larviciding, the chemicals that we use, really have really no negative impact on any kind of protected land. So we want to be sure that we’re also protecting people. We’re all interested in protecting the environment here and these protected lands and the endangered species that are in those but we also want to be sure that we’re practical about it and protecting people. So I think this will give us an opportunity going forward, to maybe have a little bit better representation there and get our message across. So we’re excited about that. I think this is a long term big benefit for us.”
Things are definitely different now than they were in the 80s.
Goodman said, “In the mosquito control world, it’s been night and day because in 1986 mainly what we were treating then was for adult mosquitoes, using adulticides. So the mosquitoes would hatch and they would fly, and then we would kill them, and you never kill all of them. So sometimes we kill them before they bit you, sometimes after. So now what we do, 80% of what we do is larvicide, so that we’re killing those mosquitoes before you ever see them. In some of the technology that we’re using it really has no negative impact on the environment, and people are realizing this now, so it’s quite different. I think also right now, we’re really in a technology boom for mosquito control. A lot of new technology is being developed. It’s going to take some time before they are actually in practice. But never seen a time before where so many new technologies are out there for mosquito control, non chemical base, mostly. So I think the future looks good. But right now, we’re concentrating on this mosquito season to be sure that we can do the best we can to protect the lives of people here in the Florida Keys and also their comfort. The Everglades is playing a big part on mosquito control, particularly in the Upper Keys right now. We’ve had a lot of west winds coming in, and there’s no treatment at all allowed in the Everglades. So nobody treats that. So there’s the salt marsh mosquito is really big there. So when the wind blows from the West, it really gets inundated. This is one of the things we’re really fighting in the Upper Keys as well. We’re told by the Navy that sometimes the swarms of mosquitoes coming in from the Everglades are so thick, just billions of them headed toward the Keys that they can track them by radar. It’s a lot of them. So that’s something that we contend with. Usually within a day or so, we can take care of that when once they do arrive in the Upper Keys, but when it’s windy and rainy and delays our treatments, that becomes a problem.”