MOSQUITO EATERS - Tiny killers tested for pest-control role

Miami Herald ^ | 09/02/03 | CURTIS MORGAN

[djf]

Lemmee put it this way.
No matter what they come up with for 'control', they will be lucky indeed if they can eradicate say 50%. They would have to be considered wildly successful if they reached 95%. So, given that there still are 5% of the sketters out there, some carrying West Nile, some carrying Malaria, and heaven knows what else, I'd still slather on the DEET!

It's always been extremely effective for me.

[Conservababe]

Slather away. But DDT will kill the mosquitoes that you are trying to repel with your ointments that may kill you in the process.

LOL

[djf]

I don't want to sound like a wacko enviromentalist, but from a scientific standpoint, chlorinated hydrocarbons are particularly nasty items. You are basically talking compounds that are closely related to agent orange. I heard of a community that put up a bunch of bat houses. The bats filled the bat houses and a few months later here wasn't a skeeter to be found. If the skeeters don't get ya, Nosferatu will!

[Conservababe]

I am going on a rant here.

I am in my fifties, and I remember DDT. I was born and raised in a Louisiana swamp. I remember my folks spraying DDT at night in the house before everyone went to bed. It was a pump spray with a can on the top. I worked well.

Then in the sixties, a kitchen scientist woman named Rachel Carson wrote a book describing how DDT was bad. The world believed her and soon it was banned for use.

Well, I am here still, but now my grandchildren have to endure diseases that are born by mosquitoes, multiple diseases.

And now, our folks think that repellents are the answer to the problem.

The answer to the problem of mosquitos is to kill them with DDT like we used to do, before kitchen table environmentalists were able to pass a law against a product that was effective and safe.

[AnalogReigns]

[djf]

Well, then, I'm gonna respond. I am in my late 40's and I remember the DDT controversies. Fact one: DDT is highly effective. In the late 60s and early 70s, we used it for mosquito control. And in fact we used stuff on the farm that makes DDT seem like whipped cream in comparison, we used some highly deadly stuff.
Yes, Rachel Carson did write an alarmist bok. This was the same timeframe as the Erich Fromme crowd, and the Limit to Growth philosophy. If you believed that, we all woulda been dead about 1990.

But there were other issues about DDT, not just egg shells. The most famous one I remember was high levels of DDT in eskimo babies, which they got from nursing from their mothers.

I'm not taking one side or the other. The best of all possible worlds would be to have some kind of biological control for mosquitos and other critters.

In fact, there is serious discussion in the scientific, agricultural, and ecological communities not about bringing back DDT.

I'm still gonna use DEET.

[Conservababe]

I use Deet too. What else can we do?

But are you for or against DDT being unbanned?

[nutmeg]

bump

[Centurion2000]

The garlic think makes me a mite suspicious, after all malaria is endemic in Korea, and used to be endemic in the South of France and Italy

The real solution? Eat a match head from a soft pack of matches like it was a pill. Every time I have done that within 24 hours of taking it the mosquitoes will avoid you like the plague as your bloodstream picks up a bit of sulfur from the match head.

[Centurion2000]

The bats filled the bat houses and a few months later here wasn't a skeeter to be found. If the skeeters don't get ya, Nosferatu will!

Bats have posible rabies ... DDT has NO side effects on humans. It's us or them.

[djf]

That is a difficult question, (well, an easy question, but hard to answer). We face a somewhat similar situation here in the PNW, increasing housing developments, bears and cougars starting to like the tasty things that are around humans, what do you do? Do I support wiping bears and cougars off the map? No. I guess if I was to answer truthfully, I would have to say no, I don't support DDT being reintroduced, thankfully, I have no say in the matter. But hear me out. That way, I am in no way responsible if years from now, an adult who nursed who gets cancer won't blame me. Humans have solved over the years so many technological problems (and also created some technological nightmares) that I have faith we can figure out some other solution.

I guess in the long run, we discover why the pilgrims didn't decide to live in Miami...

[djf]

Besides, who needs NASCAR when you can buy yourself a buglite, watch 'em sizzle, sit back and have a glass of Merlot, and smoke a Corona?

[Kenny Bunk]

Every time I have done that within 24 hours of taking it the mosquitoes will avoid you...

24 HOURS! Centurion, in 24 hours a Maine mosquito will have reduced you to a bloodless husk ... a skeleton that smells like sulfur! We need speedy medication here.

[Kenny Bunk]

Seriously now, there are some great mosquito abatement systems commercially available which have freed entire islands of the pests.

They work with sound, smell, and CO2 emitters to attract mosquitos in and fry'em, or whatever, Rich guys who live near swamps use them. In a few weeks they can wipe out a local mossquito population ...somehow. Check it out.

www.scapest.com/mosquito-machines.html - 14k

[AppyPappy]

Fish help too. However, chemicals can kill the dragonflies that eat the mosquitoes. Make sure you have plenty of creatures that eat the moquitoes. BT works as well without harming other creatures.