Only a few weeks ago, officials in Florida announced that mosquito control efforts had already commenced. Health officials are emphasizing the importance of mosquito repellent use, and state-employed pest control professionals are making sure to take a more aggressive approach toward anti-mosquito projects during 2018. It goes without saying that many people in Florida are still recovering from the Zika outbreaks that occurred a couple of years back. Memories of Zika’s presence within the state are still fresh in many resident’s minds. Nobody in Florida is willing to take even the remotest risk when it comes to mosquito control preparation this year. During the years of 2015 and 2016, Floridians were caught off-guard by the arrival of Zika. Naturally, pest control researchers aimed to establish new, improved, more accessible and ultimately more effective forms of mosquito control in order to be better prepared for future mosquito-borne disease outbreaks in the state. Well, to put it simply, many scientists concerned with pest control have succeeded at establishing creative, novel, strange and possibly more effective methods of mosquito control. One of these methods involves fish, but there is disagreement about which species of fish should be used to control mosquito populations.
A couple of weeks back, officials within Florida announced that residents could recieve fish for use in their own mosquito control efforts at home. This strange idea actually makes sense, as the fish are well known mosquito predators, and they can easily be placed within containers of standing water located on people’s property in order to combat larvae development. This blog even produced an article about Florida’s ambitious mosquito control method two weeks ago, but since then, improvements in this particular mosquito control method have been made.
The type of fish species that Florida officials were giving away are known as mosquitofish. Scientists in Tucson, Arizona claim that mosquito fish, although predators of mosquito larvae, are not ideal because they themselves are considered invasive pests in America. This is why researchers in Tucson have altered the method slightly by swapping mosquito fish with Gila topminnows. Gila topminnows are preferable for mosquito-control purposes since they are native to North America, and they also consume mosquito larvae just as rapidly as mosquito fish. In addition to that, Gila topminnows can also tolerate a greater range of temperatures than mosquito fish. At the moment, officials in Arizona are planning on releasing these mosquito-eating marine creatures into waterways and even swimming pools that have become havens for mosquito larvae.
Do you think that Gila topminnows are just as effective at destroying mosquito larvae as mosquito fish?
