Posted on 06/06/2008 5:49:27 PM PDT by fightinJAG
About 4,000 foreclosed homes in Los Angeles County have backyard pools. Health officials fear that many of these pools will turn into perfect breeding ground for mosquitoes -- and the dreaded West Nile virus -- if they go unmaintained.
(Excerpt) Read more at latimesblogs.latimes.com ...
I need some of those to put in the lake behind my house. The bug guys that go out in their boat spraying around the edges of the lake aren’t getting the job done.
A couple of tablespoons of oil will also skim over the water and prevent the larvae from breathing (or something). That is how the malaria problem on the Panama Canal was solved.
Couldn’t they just require the mortgage-holders to drain the pools?
That’s fine.
Until the next time it rains.
Good point.
It’s also a real pain-in-the-backside to get the last couple of inches of water out of the bottom of a pool.
Never had a pool :-). Anyway, I’m happy to support predatory fish. We keep a half-dozen bettas in vases.
Yes. But in most of these high foreclosure areas, the local guv is having to pick up the tab for mowing, security and, yes, mosquito control on pools.
I guess it hasn’t rained much in CA this year, but I did read that even in areas where pools were drained, enough rainwater, runoff could collect to make mosquitoes a problem.
Yeah, I wonder how they’d do in a lake. I’ve seen areas with many, many drainage ponds and ditches that could use something effective to do away with the skeeters.
Yes, that makes sense.
The mosquitofish (Gambusia affinis) is a species of freshwater fish, also commonly known simply by its generic name, gambusia, although such usage is ambiguous. It is sometimes called the western mosquitofish, to distinguish it from the eastern mosquitofish (G. holbrooki). In Hong Kong, it is also known as the live-bearing tooth-carp. It is a member of the family Poeciliidae of order Cyprinodontiformes.
These fish are native to the watershed of the Gulf of Mexico, where it has long been known that they feed readily on the aquatic larval and pupal stages of mosquitoes. They are remarkably hardy, surviving in waters of very low oxygen saturations, high salinities (including twice that of seawater), and high temperatures; they can even survive in waters up to 42 °C for short periods. For these reasons, this species may now be the most widespread freshwater fish in the world, having been introduced as a biocontrol to tropical and temperate countries in both hemispheres, and then spreading further both naturally and through even further introductions. The majority of these introductions were foolish; in most countries where mosquitofish have been introduced it is has been proved that the endemic fish species were already providing maximal mosquito control, and that the introduction of mosquitofish has been both unnecessary and highly damaging to endemic fish and other endemic aquatic life. In Australia G.holbrooki has caused great damage to native fish and frog species. For example it is considered responsible for the extinction of rainbowfish in sub-tropical streams around Brisbane.
from Wikipedia.
Wonder what happens to CA when these fish escape the swimming pools?
It's either that or risk the joys of West Nile Virus.
These fish are nothing new.........
Not until they learn to catch a frisbee
That’s good to know!
I'm laughing at the visual in my mind...escaping fish.
Wow. Not a good idea introducing them into my lake. We’ve got Big Mouth Bass out there that I like to catch when I can’t get out on the ocean.
Go to your local fish pet shop and buy a number of guppies. That’l take care of it. They breed every few days and love skeeters.
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