Posted on 11/04/2011 7:25:46 AM PDT by ETL
Families Terrorized By Swarms Of Underground Insects That Invade Homes
NEW YORK (CBS 2) — An insect invasion is terrorizing New York City homeowners, making life miserable, even dangerous, for many families. Parents have been forced to take extreme measures to protect their children and their homes.
CBS 2’s Dave Carlin investigates the growing Upper West Side mosquito mystery:
These rare mosquitoes are extra blood-thirsty and active year-round. Carlin saw some of them in a lab after they were collected in the unlikeliest of places, Bernard Lagan’s home on West 84th Street.
“They trapped 150 mosquitoes in the basement in a 24-hour period coming from underground and into the basement and up in to the house through the air vents and it’s the same story as the other brownstones on this block,” Lagan told Carlin.
It’s an invasion that has almost every resident of 84th Street between Riverside and West End Avenue slapping, scratching and suffering.
“They’re hungry. They’re hungry,” said resident Susan Nicholson.
“Three on this ear; one on his cheek; one on his neck,” another woman said, illustrating the bites on one of her children. “And there are some on his arms going up his arm.”
(Excerpt) Read more at newyork.cbslocal.com ...
West Nile started in New York in 1999. The United Nations is in New York. Look for most of the trouble to start there. :>) Tin foil hats being handed out at JFK
“It’s only a matter of time before they transmit some disease from the sewer rats to these Manhattanites.”
I have more sympathy for the rats getting something from these Manhattanites.
Yes, we have several varieties of bats here. You often see them flying around near sunset, mostly in places like Central Park, but also in the suburban sections of the other boros. Brown Bats and some other species.
Bat watching in New York Cty | West Side Spirit
As the final days of summer sink into fall, New Yorkers may want to add one more thing to their to-do list of last hurrahs—bat watching. An organization called the New York City Bat Group, formed in 2004, promotes awareness and education about the bat species native to the city. One of their missions is to simply get New Yorkers to look up.
“Any night that it’s warm in the summer and the insects are flying, the bats are out there eating them,” said Danielle Gustafson, one of the group’s original members. She said that many people mistake them for low flying birds, but bats can be found in most parks throughout the city. Gustafson works with the Museum of Natural History to lead tours through Central Park, teaching people how to spot red and little brown bats, two of the most common types.
Gustafson isn’t a biologist; she worked for the New York Stock Exchange for 14 years and now runs digital and social media for a bank holding company. But her enthusiastic fascination for the winged creatures is perhaps the best possible qualification to educate the general public about an animal that many associate with Halloween, vampires and a certain caped crusader of pop culture. She first got interested in bats when, due to her interest in bird watching, a friend invited her on a trip to the Amazon with a group of wildlife and bat conservationists. The more she learned, the more she became endeared to the often misunderstood animals.
How does she dispel an ingrained sense of chiroptophobia?
“You start out with the fact that they’re mammals,” Gustafson said. “They’re closer to primates than rats are.”
She also marvels at their intelligence and instincts, recalling a time when she and her husband were helping a friend complete research on bats in French Guinea for her doctorate. (The couple got engaged on a bat research trip in South America and requested donations to bat conservation organizations in lieu of wedding gifts.) They were netting mothers carrying their babies on their backs when they noticed one juvenile missing its mom. Their scientist friend told them they should take care of the baby and deposit it back to the same spot in the jungle where they had found it, since the mother had probably dropped it off to feed and would return to pick it up later.
“They park their kids and then come back,” Gustafson said, admitting that before she had witnessed it, she was skeptical the bat would remember the exact spot. “They have great special memory.” When they tried netting in the same spot two nights in a row, all of the bats knew to steer clear of the area the second night.
On her bat excursions, Gustafson points out the bats’ ability to zero in on their prey—insects—without swiping people or branches. She uses a bat detector to tune in to their calls in order to find and identify them.
“The closer to actual prey [they get], it sounds like they’re giving someone a raspberry because the clicks are so rapid and they’re zeroing in on the prey, and that’s hilarious,” Gustafson said. “You realize how close over your head they’re flying, how uninterested they are in you.”
But Gustafson insists that people should be interested in the bats, because an alarming number of local bats have been dying of something called White Nose Syndrome. Because there is no official count of the bat population in the city, it’s difficult to say how the disease is affecting them, but scientists are seeing it throughout the Northeast and are concerned that it could lead to local extinction.
“These are hibernating bats; they’re having these massive die-offs,” said Gustafson. “Bats have one baby per year, so these die-offs are really alarming.” The Bat Group hopes to secure funding to figure out what’s causing the spread of the deadly fungus.
Gustafson remembers the reason she became interested in bats in the first place and hopes it will draw others to care about the animals.
“There is something about living and working in New York City that makes you hungry for the antidote to the buildings and the concrete. It kind of makes you very aware of the natural creatures,” she said.
http://www.dec.ny.gov/pubs/46905.html
Would she even consider smearing him with N,N-Diethyl-meta-toluamide (deet)? The active ingredient that's most effective in insect repellents.
Mosquitos to the west!
Bed bugs to the east!
OWS leeches, ticks and parasites in the middle.
What a world!
AP article...
Why are thousands of bats dying in New York?
Mysterious ‘white nose syndrome’ spreading at alarming rate
Mike Groll / AP
A team led by Alan Hicks, a wildlife biologist for the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation, looks for bats in an abandoned limestone mine in Rosendale, N.Y., on Feb. 7. ...”
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/23169737/
Thank you for the info on NYC and New York State bats. We live in the Upper Hudson River Valley and I was vaguely aware that the bats were having problems in their winter caves. The last few summers have seen less bat activity for us.
I love the brown bats - they set up a maternity ward in the rafters and crawl space in our barn in early summer. They leave the babies there with a few “sitters” when they go out to feed.
It os good to know that NYC has their native bats and I hope they are able to enjoy a feast on the nuisance mosquitos, although it might be getting close to hibernation time.
When my nephew was in grad school for Pharmacy, he came to visit, in July, in a wooded area on a river. He absolutely refused to apply DEET or Repel and still went out into the woods.
Kid won’t eat any red meat, either and told me in 1999 that Bulgaria was superior to the US at that time.
So, he doesn’t want to use insect repellant? Fine.
‘Skeeters are news?????
This past summer, our two grand kids that live with us went out to a church members property to camp out. We sent two partial cans of “Deep Woods Off” with them, when they got home, I asked them if they used it all, they told me that “Jeremy” the owner, threw away everybody’s “Off” because it had something “bad” in it.
I let it go, for the sake of harmony in the church and went out and bought two new cans and gave my grands a little talk on respecting other people’s property and included a little talk on liberalism and how it turns people’s brains to mush. They won’t be going back to those people’s house for a camp out anymore.
Time to leave some open containers of water near Wall Street. It would make the nights of the OWS people more amusing.
There are so many illnesses carried by mosquitoes and especially by ticks, that this is really a dangerous attitude, IMO.
Our vet, who is an avid hunter, has cautioned us to use Repel on our outdoor clothing, year round, but especially Spring/Summer/Fall. Our dog has had several bouts of anaplasmosis and we have had several neighbors with severe cases of Lyme’s and another tick-borne illness that is even worse, the name which escapes me at the moment. Repel doesn’t have DEET, but it does have a potent tick repellant.
The vet advised us to not buy the version available at Walmart, because it lacks the particular chemical that makes it effective. Instead, we go in on a group buy from an online source. Pricey, but worth it, IMO.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.