County facing obstacles in fight against mosquitoes
The buzz word around Lee County is “mosquitoes.”
They have been out in force for several weeks and now that the summer rains have begun, there is even more of them.
That is a problem for the Lee County Mosquito Control District because they cannot fly as much as they would like to get a handle on the problem.
Weather has caused them to scrub several missions, said Shelly Redovan, deputy director of communication and education for the district.
In May and June, extremely high tides in the Pine Island area allowed mosquitoes to hatch and the winds blowing onshore blew in multiple broods of the creatures in varying stages of their lifespan.
“When there are multiple stages, we have to use different products,” Redovan said. “If it’s windy or too rainy, we can’t get out during the day to spray. There have been some problems to get the (aircraft) out during the day to spray (the larvae).
“That’s one of the difficulties,” she said. “We have a tight time frame and are trying to cover as much area as possible.”
Storms have been popping up during the night and day in the past several weeks, causing the pilots to scrub missions.
“If you don’t get them, then you have adults coming off, then you have difficulty with adults,” she said.
Another problem on Pine Island — state and nearby federal lands have limitations on the products that the district can use to control the populations.
“When they hatch, then we have to knock them down and (use) an adulticide product,” Redovan said. “If there are state or federal lands, we cannot spray over them.”
The district has had trucks spraying and the DC-3 airplane has flown, but the level of control needed to keep people from being bothered by the mosquitoes has not been there.
“The problem is, for example, if we collect about 300 (mosquitoes) in a trap a night, that is generally a benchmark that people in Pine Island are going to start calling,” she said.
At one point, the district counted 136,000 of the pests in one night.
“You can’t stand in a location that’s going to have 136,000 mosquitoes.
“We sprayed and got very good control — 90 percent control is pretty good. We knocked down a huge amount,” she said.
The numbers got down to just more than 1,300 mosquitoes per trap.
“That’s wonderful right?” she asked.
Wrong.
“The difference between 300 and 1,300 is still not that much better,” she said. “When they (people) step out and see quite a few at that (1,300-plus level), it’s still very bad. It’s very uncomfortable for people.”
In addition, mosquitoes do not like to be crowded. They will find a place to spread out.
Hence, the reinfestation from state and federal lands that cannot be sprayed.
“It’s been like that since May,” she said. “I know that we’ve already gone through more pesticides in those three months than we normally would in a whole year. We’re cranking out everything we have … to try to give them some relief.”
The Florida Department of Environmental Protection pursuant to policy and even state law does not allow certain pesticides to be used on their lands, according to information provided by the agency’s public information office.
There are a few exceptions like if someone contracts a mosquito-borne illness such as West Nile virus.
“If we could just get permission from the state of Florida and the federal government, it wouldn’t be as bad,” Redovan said. “This is killing us — it’s my taxpayer money too. It’s killing those people who are living in Lee County that we don’t have the option of occasionally putting the plane up and hitting those lands. We wouldn’t have a reinfestation.”