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Skeeters! Rain Brings A Bumper Crop

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By KEITH MORELLI

The Tampa Tribune

Published: August 16, 2008

Updated: 08/16/2008 12:14 am

TAMPA - You are at peace with the world - standing in front of your grill with a nice rack of ribs roasting - and the moment is ruined by a sting on the back of your knee.

Or maybe you're in bed late at night, nestling in, when you hear the tiniest of dentist drills buzzing next to your ear. You swat at it but miss, and it always comes back.

Mosquitoes are part of Florida culture, and they are enjoying a prosperous summer. They celebrate this with a banquet, along with their friends and families, and everything with red blood cells is the entree.

The past few years, people might have wondered where all the skeeters had gone. Simple answer: The drought knocked back the population, providing a phony sense of security.

Insect experts now are noticing a blossoming mosquito population, which is business as usual, said Roxanne Connelly, director of the Florida Medical Entomology Laboratory in Vero Beach.

"We are having higher populations of mosquitoes throughout the state," she said Friday. "I think, basically, we are getting back to normal with the rains every day. We haven't seen that for a few years. We've had it nice for a couple of years."

Most counties are seeing more mosquitoes in traps put out to get counts, she said, calling the growing population "intense" in some parts of the state.

It's people who live along the coast who usually are vexed by salt marsh mosquitoes. Now, people in Florida's interior are getting some of it from pests breeding in puddles and ponds, stagnant water in birdbaths, even that upside-down Frisbee on the back deck.

You can fight back, Connelly said.

"In your backyard, you can do a general cleanup," she said. That means checking for anything that can hold water, not just pet dishes, but anything, like a tarp over something that can sag and hold water.

"If you have birdbaths," she said, "just flush them every few days, and that will work."

The buzzing parasites don't seem to be spreading diseases to humans yet, but that doesn't make the bite any less itchy. Biologists say there are three dangerous mosquito-borne diseases that occasionally occur in Florida: Eastern equine encephalitis, St. Louis encephalitis and West Nile virus.

Here's a tutorial on the whining pest: Only female mosquitoes bite. They feed on blood to help the eggs develop, and when the bug bites, its saliva is released into the skin. The spit contains proteins that cause the bothersome, itchy allergic reaction.

You might think mosquitoes are the same statewide, but Florida has about 80 species of mosquito, ranging, alphabetically, from the Aedes aegypti to the Wyeomyia vanduzeei, according to the Florida Medical Entomology Laboratory's mosquito information Web site.

Most are found throughout the state or live in wide-ranging areas. Others are found only in specific counties or areas, the Web site states.

Hillsborough County Mosquito Control manager Carlos Fernandez said his workers have put in a lot of overtime this summer battling the swarms. He said that in the past 45 days, the department's 13 trucks have gone out on 130 sorties, each four hours long, to battle mosquitoes.

The front line in Hillsborough County has been in South Tampa and the Ruskin area, he said. That's where traps have registered the greatest number of mosquitoes.

Residents who call in about heavy mosquito infestation have some effect on where the trucks go, he said, but the vehicles generally are sent where the traps indicate the greatest population.

The benefit of having a drought the past couple of years is that the mosquito-borne diseases ebb, he said. There are some reports of Eastern equine encephalitis infecting horses in the interior of Florida.

In Pinellas County, mosquito fighters are waging the same war, said mosquito control district operations manager Nancy Iannotti.

"The afternoon rains and the morning rains and the higher temperatures mean an elevated mosquito population," she said.

"It varies from area to area," she said. "Some are affected by rains, and some are affected by the tides. And they are always around people's homes, all year-round."

Reporter Keith Morelli can be reached at (813) 259-7760 or kmorelli@tampatrib.com.

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