COLLIER COUNTY, Fla. — Wet season may be a few months away, but Collier Mosquito Control District is already looking ahead to mosquito season; including a new pilot program to reduce the number of diseases carried by mosquitoes.
“It’s very similar to as if a cat or dog gets spade or neutered,” said Deyco McDuffie, Field Validation Manager with Collier Mosquito Control District.
It might sound funny neutering a mosquito, but Collier Mosquito Control District hopes by releasing sterile male Aedes Aegypti mosquitoes, they can reduce the population.
Fox 4 Meteorologist Andrew Shipley visited with Collier Mosquito Control District to learn more about the pilot program. Watch report below:
“What we do is go out into the field and bring in local strains of mosquitoes here from Collier County,” said McDuffie. “We then ship to a lab in Atlanta, who then sterilizes them through a low dose of x-rays.”
Those mosquitoes are then shipped back to be released. McDuffie says they plan to release these mosquitoes in a small area to see how the population responds.
And if you are wondering why they would release mosquitoes? The males do not bite and will only travel few hundred meters in their lifetime. Also, through the x-ray sterilization method, mosquitoes are not genetically modified.
“It is like a suppressive method we are using,” said McDuffie. “It is not to eradicate them necessarily. But it is definitely to keep the numbers as low as possible, so they are not a risk for nuisance or disease.
McDuffie says they plan release thousands sterile male mosquitoes starting in March and will continue to release throughout the summer.
“Essentially those males should be mating with those wild females to keep the numbers low and keep those eggs to be nonviable,” said McDuffie.
McDuffie says the district is starting with the Aedes Aegypti species, as they are known carriers of diseases like Zika and Dengue, they are also hard to treat.
“They have resistance to a lot of the conventional methods we use, like chemicals and different things like that,” said McDuffie. “So, we need to integrate our treatment program a bit more and add methods like this to better control them.”
The district won’t know the full results of the pilot program until next winter. But with promising results in other areas of the country, they will likely expand this program to other species in the years to come.
