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Lethbridge spared big mosquito problem, so far

May 18, 2018 | 10:25 AM

LETHBRIDGE – Following a winter that went on forever, we might be seeing a silver lining this summer in the form of fewer mosquitoes.

Ron Esau, mosquito technician for the city’s parks department, had feared the excessive snow would lead to a lot of standing water for mosquito eggs to hatch in.

“Most surprisingly, all that snow, it really melted. It soaked into the ground.  A lot of it just evaporated. So, it’s actually been surprisingly dry out,” he said. There hasn’t been a lot of rain since then to create puddles.

At the start of the year, the mosquitoes hatch from eggs that were laid by adults, potentially years ago, once they’re in water. Once one mosquito gets a blood meal, it will lay as many as 200 eggs a week later, and that cycle goes on. That’s why it’s important to attack the mosquito population early.

“The numbers can really escalate over the summer,” Esau explained. “Fortunately, this year, with a later winter, the mosquito will have less of a chance to go through that routine so many times, because everything started late.”

Esau is optimistic, though there’s the potential for more rain over the next couple of months, that the numbers will be lower this year thanks to the dry spring. If it’s hot, though, he cautions that larvae can develop into full-grown mosquitoes more quickly, so it’s a shorter window for the city to attack the larvae with VectoBac, a natural bacterial product that doesn’t harm anything else.

He added they’ll never get rid of all the mosquitoes, but they want to kill as many as they can to make Lethbridge’s outdoor spaces more enjoyable.

“Mosquitoes are about the most self-serving organism there is on this earth. They aren’t an important food source for anything else, and they bring a lot of diseases to mankind, things like West Nile Virus and malaria and yellow fever. Over time they’ve been a real scourge to mankind.”

Homeowners can do their part by dumping out any collected water and draining or pumping low areas.