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.
What do our mosquito numbers look like?
Goodman said, “Right now, the numbers for the Aedes aegypti, which is our main vector mosquito for carrying Dengue fever and yellow fever and chikungunya, the numbers have been very low. We really managed to keep this down, even though some of the other mosquito numbers are higher, this one has been low. There’s a number of mosquito borne diseases in Florida. Miami has had Dengue fever and West Nile virus is now a little bit locally transmitting in some of the northern counties. Chikungunya is coming into some of the counties with travel related, and Dengue is increasing. Miami’s had some and Brevard County, is really the main one, is far north for Dengue fever. So it’s been kind of an unusual season this year. Worldwide, the numbers of mosquito borne diseases continue to be on the rise. But here in the Florida Keys, we don’t have any local transmission, and haven’t had this year, we have had some travel related people coming in with the Dengue fever, but we’re able to spray around their homes so that it doesn’t transmit locally. So right now, that mosquito is under good control. We’re constantly working on that one. Every day we’re working, controlling it, monitoring it, to keep those numbers down. So, that’s the good news. Our job here in the Florida Keys is to keep this community safe and also keep it comfortable. So far, we’ve done a really good job in keeping it safe, keeping it comfortable in some of the areas because of the salt marsh mosquito, this has been a challenging year for us, for that mosquito.”
How is the Wolbachia project going?
Goodman said, “We’ve been we’ve been releasing Wolbachia male mosquitoes in two sites in the Upper Keys, and one site, in the Middle Keys, since May, and it’s going very well. We’re releasing every Tuesday and Friday, so we’ll be releasing again today in those sites, monitoring it, doing a lot of follow up, testing. So far everything has gone very well and we’ll continue to release this mosquito probably through October, and then we’ll be able to collect all our data and do a lot of statistical analysis and determine how effective it is and then decide what we want to do next year. The main reason we’re using these new types of technologies is because the Aedes aegypti mosquito is becoming resistant to some of the better chemicals. Right now, we’re able to control it fairly well, pretty well, but we know that the resistance is building up, so long term, we need some new technology. So these sterile insect techniques, like the Wolbachia, like Oxitec, are going to become more important for us in the future. So we’re really doing a lot of groundbreaking testing on these, which will pay off long term.”
The salt marsh mosquito has also been challenging.
Goodman said, “This year has been an exceptionally bad year for the salt marsh mosquito. That’s the mosquito that is about more than 80% of the total mosquito population in the Florida Keys and also in South Florida. What we’re seeing is not just for the Keys. It all is for South Florida and for really a big part of Florida, more than ever. It’s not exactly the same in all areas of the Keys. The Lower Keys and Key West, it’s more of a normal year. We had some problems in Stock Island early on, with some new breeding sites that we found early on. Now we have problems in Sugar Loaf and Saddlebunch Keys, Bay Point. There’s several reasons there. We got some new breeding sites there that we’ve had difficulty finding and treating. But other than that, for the Lower Keys and Key West, it’s been a pretty normal season. But for the Middle Keys and the Upper Keys, it’s not been. We’ve had considerably higher numbers. The numbers are higher now with the rain that we’ve just had, the numbers are going back up again. So, we have been working really hard, I think, ever since May, where people have worked every weekend since then. You see our helicopters flying, our trucks out. Some of our treatments are up 500% from last year, and some of the collections, there are really 500% or more of mosquitoes. There are several reasons for this that we’ve identified, and we’re working to solve these problems.”
There are some upcoming town hall meetings.
Goodman said, “Because of the higher numbers, we wanted people to understand what’s going on here and what we’re doing and let’s give them a chance to ask questions for themselves, so that they can better understand what we’re doing. So we have three Town Hall educational sessions set up. One was last night in in Key West, actually, and there weren’t really many people there, like I said, because in the Lower Keys, in Key West, it’s more of a normal year. We had a few hiccups there, but it’s more normal. Tonight, we will be in Marathon at six o’clock at our boardroom at the Florida Keys Mosquito Control District at our headquarters there, north end of the airport. And at six o’clock we will have our educational session there. We hope to have a pretty full house, really, because Middle Keys have really been impacted this year. Tomorrow night, we will be at the Murray Nelson Center in Key Largo. We will also plan to have a large crowd there. We’ll be there at six o’clock, and we’ll stay as long as the people are there and asking questions. We’ll have a team of our people. They are our leadership, our scientific people there to explain what’s going on. There’s a number of reasons for what’s happening right now. One is that, we’re seeing the same problem in the Keys that the county is seeing, particularly in the Lower Keys and Upper Keys for the need to raise the roads. Here in the Florida Keys, we have about 1000 islands, and about 700 of them are named. We live on about 30, but the mosquitoes live on a lot of them. The salt marsh mosquitoes can travel, can fly about 60 miles. So if they’re in one spot, they’ll be in other places, in the Keys very quickly. What’s happening is with this higher water levels, particularly at new moons and full moons and right now, we’re having super high tides, king tides, and we’re seeing more and more of our islands are we’re inundated with high tides and causing new breeding sites. When you have so many islands, it’s like finding a needle in a haystack sometime to find a new breeding site, they can be breeding thousands of mosquitoes and infesting a large part of the community. So this is our challenge here. We’ve got several new mapping strategies that we’re working on. The Weather Service has come up with a new program to kind of give us some advanced warning there. We also have a lot of aerial reconnaissance missions, looking for these new breeding sites. So when we find them, we treat them. This is an ongoing project. But this is fixable, I think with some of the new technology that we’re looking at, we’ll be able to more quickly find these all over the thousands of acres here in the Keys that we control. Another problem we have is we have so many government protected lands in the Keys. This is a very environmentally sensitive area. The state has been buying up properties. We’re an area of state concern, state critical concern. So the county and the state have been buying up properties. When they do that, they put restrictions on mosquito control. These are now in every Key, and a lot of them we cannot adulticide. A lot of them we can’t even larvicide under certain restrictions. So it’s making it a little bit difficult for us to treat like we used to treat and would like. So we’re in the process of negotiating, renegotiating with a lot of these to see if we can get some mediated conditions for spraying to allow us to spray a little bit more. We are very much environmentalist like everybody else here in the Keys, but we want to be sure that the reasons that we’re not spraying are is for the environment, and not just because somebody doesn’t want us spraying, because right now, the mosquito numbers are higher, and we need to be out there more. So those are two things, and both of those are fixable. The third problem we have in the Upper Keys is we’re getting more and more mosquitoes coming in from the Everglades. We’ve seen five, six times, 600% as many coming into Key Largo up to Ocean Reef as we have, and the Everglades restoration project has really inundated thousands of acres of land that have been dry for centuries. Now they’re marshlands and breeding mosquitoes and they’re coming into the Upper Keys. We’ve done sometimes 500% more treatments than we did last year, and still having problems and our treatments are very effective. We knock down the mosquitoes, but the next day, they’re right back, because it’s just like wave after wave coming in. So this is a concern to us. In fact, we’ve been in touch with people in the Everglades to express our concerns, and what they’re telling us is that, given time, there will be more and more predators move into these new places in the Everglades, with fish and birds and bring some type of balance back. So we’re looking forward to that. Hopefully this is a one time season for this big impact, but we’ll be watching, following this closely.”
How is the budget looking?
Goodman said, “At 3:30 today, we will have our regular September board meeting, and there’s a lot of things that we’ll be discussing there. A lot of them are general things. We also have a new CFO that we that has just joined us recently. Our current CFO is retiring, so we’ll be introducing her and then at 5:05 we have our final public hearing for our budget, and so we invite everybody to come there in Marathon in our headquarters building at 5:05. Our millage rate this year is .3999, it’s about 9% below last year’s millage, and it’ll give us this rollback for our ad valorem taxes. So we are at rollback this year. Even though we’ve been treating a lot more, we have used a lot of technology to keep our costs in line. So we’re happy to have a rollback budget this year. We’re buying our fourth helicopter this year, which will be in place next year, so we will have completed our fleet next year. I think we’ve got a very good budget that really, really prepares us for the future. There’s reserves in there for emergencies that we may have, for hurricanes, for disease, infestation, a lot of things there. So I think it’s a good budget, and I think it’s a fair budget for the citizens and taxpayers of this county. So we’re happy that we’re being at roll back this year. We have so many new people here that are not familiar with what they can do to help mosquito control control this by dumping out water on their property, because all of these mosquitoes are bred right around our homes. If everybody would dump out the water around their home at least once a week, we would not have to be talking much about Dengue fever these mosquito borne diseases from the Aedes aegypti. So that’s a constant reminder that we have for this community.”
For more information, click here: https://www.keysmosquito.org/