Fort Myers Florida Weekly

THE GOLDILOCKS PLACE

WHERE PARADISE ALSO IS MOSQUITO HEAVEN



“We have 40- some species and we’re actively trying to control about 25 at any one time.” — Scott Schermerhorn, director of Charlotte County Mosquito Control

“We have 40- some species and we’re actively trying to control about 25 at any one time.” — Scott Schermerhorn, director of Charlotte County Mosquito Control

MAGGY RENO HURCHALLA, HER OLDER SISTER, Janet, and another high school friend were willing to suffer a little, so they traveled from South Florida and the 21-acre Reno family homestead in the woods surrounded by a growing Miami, to the west coast. They crossed the bridge to Marco Island and drove out on the beach, three teenagers with wheels but little cash intent on a camp-out. It was summer. The Reno girls had done the camping trip to Marco on a number of occasions with their parents, but times had changed. The former Supreme Allied Commander, a man named Dwight Eisenhower, was now the nation’s 34th president. Elvis Presley had bounced through Florida the year before in May of 1955 when Maggy was 15, touching off small cultural explosions represented not by the very present hordes of mosquitos but by hordes of girls at Daytona Beach, Tampa, Fort Myers, Orlando and Jacksonville (twice) between May 8 and 13, hastening the change in American culture. And Marco Island now had some houses and commercial development — not just a fishing village and a single retreat, the Marco Inn, which had been young Maggy’s experience in the late 1940s.

Environmentalist Maggy Hurchalla came of age in 1950s Florida and remembers when humans had little defense against mosquitos. COURTESY PHOTO

Environmentalist Maggy Hurchalla came of age in 1950s Florida and remembers when humans had little defense against mosquitos. COURTESY PHOTO

In those earlier days, her parents wisely brought mosquito netting for sleeping, but this wasn’t that kind of trip. The girls had 6-12 insect repellent that came in small glass bottles, and grit.

They needed all of it.

“Nobody was on the beach,” she recalled of a time when Collier County’s Mosquito Control had only recently begun operations, using a single borrowed pick-up truck to spray DDT in places nowhere near Marco, a fact now on display in a vivid summertime museum exhibit at the Collier County Government Center, tracking the history of mosquito control.

“We had to put 6-12 everywhere — in our hair, between our toes … have you ever smelled it?”

Not for any longer than necessary, is the answer. It rates as one of the more malodorous care products introduced to the world, a substance, like DDT, now banned because of its detrimental effect on humans and the environment.

ABOVE: A worker sprays oil on larvae in a ditch around 1910 in an effort to keep mosquitos at bay in Collier County. RIGHT: In 1950, a borrowed truck comprised the entire mosquito control effort in Collier County.

ABOVE: A worker sprays oil on larvae in a ditch around 1910 in an effort to keep mosquitos at bay in Collier County. RIGHT: In 1950, a borrowed truck comprised the entire mosquito control effort in Collier County.

“It’s somewhat conjecture, but there’s a suggestion that the residual effect of the use of DDT has worn off now, and we see more mosquitos as a result,” says Patrick Linn, director of Collier County Mosquito Control.

Worn off or not, the Reno girls weren’t going to benefit or suffer from it. They had 6-12 for those opportunities.

It worked, somewhat, and it was as good as mosquito control got, for them.

Like any place along the mangrove southwest coast of the peninsula then, Marco had a welcoming committee of about 8 billion salt marsh mosquitos waiting to greet the campers, not to mention the even more disturbing No-See-Ums, also known as sand flies, biting gnats, biting midges or punkies — the number is a euphemism for a whole lot.

But to put the quantity in perspective, says Aaron Lloyd, assistant director of the nation’s largest mosquito-fighting county operation, the Lee County Mosquito Control District, “We have about 56,000 acres of salt marsh now, and one square foot of salt marsh can hold 39,000 larval salt-marsh mosquitos.”

COURTESY OF THE COLLIER MUSEUM

COURTESY OF THE COLLIER MUSEUM

That means 56,000 acres could hold a maximum of about 2.4 billion salt marsh mosquitos, alone. And there were a lot more than 56,000 acres of salt marsh in Collier and Lee counties 65 years ago.

Although salt march mosquitos can transmit heartworm to dogs, they aren’t a vector for human disease. Nevertheless, they’re three or four times bigger than most of their freshwater brethren, once earning the tag, “gallon nippers.”

The Reno girls — anybody from Miami in those days — were also familiar with the more dangerous freshwater mosquitos. They could blow into Miami from the Everglades that lay right off the western edge of downtown, in August, on the west wind. Which was all part of the reason (combined with the lack of affordable single-family air conditioning before about 1960) the state included only 3.7 million residents then, not 22 million, the current and growing population.

LINN

LINN

“If you were really going to lose your mind, it would not be from the mosquitos,” Mrs. Hurchalla has long since decided — “those would just make you anemic. It would be the sand flies. They could make you (crazy).”

But on that trip, the mosquito-sand fly experience took a distant second place in memory, she says, to one of the most powerful natural moments in her long and widely traveled life. Although she wasn’t trying to and didn’t even know what it was at the time, “we were sitting on the beach being eaten alive when I saw the flash of green for the first time. It was magic.”

The experience also served as a symbolic demarcation point, perhaps, between the old world with its difficulties and wonders into which Mrs. Hurchalla was born in 1940, and the new one, without some of the difficulties, but with a lot of development and a lot of applied science to control mosquitos.

MURPHY

MURPHY

Evolution of a bug fight

Now, more that 50 mosquito control districts exist in a 67-county state, most of them originating in the late 1950s or early 1960s, and many now operating with annual budgets in the $3 million range, including both Charlotte’s and Palm Beach County’s districts. And now, mosquito control is a premier example of applied science aimed at both health and comfort for people in every community — malaria, for example, has been widely eradicated — with sometimes compelling new research.

But it wasn’t always that way, and its effects may not have been as benign.

“People were born in mosquitos, and accepted it as a way of life, for the most part,” says Billy Murphy, born into a ranching and farming family near LaBelle in Hendry County in 1939. He wonders what the price of comfort may be.

“The fisheries have gone down in amounts of fish, and maybe part of the reason is because of mosquito control and drainage, which go hand in hand. A lot of the drainage in the old days was done to control mosquitos as much as for water control. And I wonder how many kinds of birds, fish and other animals — frogs — utilized larvae in the water. There are so many things that depended on mosquito larvae for food, including little minnows and baitfish that helped other wildlife proliferate.”

SCHERMERHORN

SCHERMERHORN

While mosquito control operations got cleaner and more precise over time, they also got bigger.

Lee County now stands as the proverbial Cadillac of mosquito control operations, other control district directors acknowledge.

“They have an air force,” observes Scott Schermerhorn, director of Charlotte County’s operation, which owns a single helicopter.

Lee County’s Mosquito Control District includes a budget in the $20 million to $22 million range and 85 full-time staff beefed up to 130 in the busiest months. The district has seven fixed-wing planes that can cover about 24,000 acres each in a single night mission; six H125 Airbus helicopters purchased in 2018 that can hold 11,000 pounds of material, allowing them to spray Pine Island in just two hours; two 55-pluspound drones that can spray between five and 50 acres in a 15-minute battery powered mission over the hardest to-reach locations, along with two other reconnaissance drones; and a sizeable fleet of vehicles. And all of it is buttressed by a sophisticated research operation.

COURTESY OF COLLIER DISTRICT MOSQUITO CONTROL

COURTESY OF COLLIER DISTRICT MOSQUITO CONTROL

All that is why the Lee Mosquito Control District now gets to work with the International Atomic Energy Agency in a new test project that has district staff releasing about 300,000 healthy mosquitos each week on Captiva Island, explains Mr. Lloyd.

It sounds bad but it’s all good. The mosquitos are healthy, yes, but they’re also male — males don’t seek blood meals — and they’ve been sterilized.

“We’re going to increase that number, so people may see a bunch of males flying around, but they won’t get bit,” says Mr. Lloyd.

A drone briquette buttresses mosquito-control efforts in hard-to-reach places.

A drone briquette buttresses mosquito-control efforts in hard-to-reach places.

“They mate with females, their eggs collapse, and the females won’t produce offspring. We’ve been doing these releases for a year now on Captiva with some promising results. Various governmental organizations across world want to see if this technology can work for vector control.”

For good reason.

“This is aimed at one species, Aedes aegypti, the species that transmits dengue and yellow fever, and the Zika virus,” Mr. Lloyd explains of the Captiva test. “That particular species is important when it comes to vectoring pathogens. That’s why we picked that first — to see if the concept would work.”

With some luck and mostly science, if it does work the practice could be used to control other species as well, he hopes.

Meanwhile, control, not eradication is the duty of the day and mosquitos remain both irritating and in some cases dangerous — especially in a world where they are considered the number one predator of humans, and sometimes thought to be directly or indirectly responsible for the deaths of about half of all humans who have ever lived.

One trap yields 39,000 mosquitos in one night in Collier County.

One trap yields 39,000 mosquitos in one night in Collier County.

Those unsettling facts are presented in the Collier museum exhibit, called, “Swamp Angels: A History of Mosquitos and Mosquito Control.”

What it was like

In recent weeks, Collier County — now in the process of seeking to expand its area of operations from just over 400 to 735 square miles, and working with a one-time-only budget of $32 million to build up its aircraft fleet and open an operations center in Immokalee — reported three cases of West Nile virus, Mr. Linn said. The disease appeared in people from the sprawling, less-inhabited eastern part of the county sharing a border with Broward County — a low, hot, wet, freshwater landscape.

Near there recently on the edge of Collier-Seminole State Park, one of the many traps of about 10 by 20 inches set out by mosquito control districts everywhere to measure populations collected almost 80,000 mosquitos in a single night.

FAZEKAS

FAZEKAS

“That’s probably something like what it once would have been here,” Mr. Linn surmised.

They go in a freezer operating at 80 degrees Fahrenheit below zero before being brought out, separated into piles each roughly containing 100 or so, and counted, says Robin King, a Collier district spokeswoman. Scientists also separate them by mosquito type to determine if particular disease-carrying mosquitos are present.

For the most part nowadays, only people like Mrs. Hurchalla or Mr. Murphy know what being surrounded by thousands of mosquitos attracted to the carbon dioxide people exhale, their body odors and temperatures once was like.

“When you slap your arm and kill six or eight mosquitos, and swing it around and do it again, it’s probably time to go in” — in behind the screen doors that were once almost universal in Florida living and now have mostly vanished, Mr. Murphy says.

He spent his career farming in Hendry and Lee counties, while Maggy Reno went off to Swarthmore College near Philadelphia, met and married her husband, Jim Hurchalla, in her junior year, and returned to Florida, eventually moving to Martin County near Stuart. There she became a longtime Martin County commissioner and one of the state’s leading environmentalists while her late sister, Janet, became U.S. attorney general during the Clinton administration.

Starting in 1968 near Stuart the Hurchallas raised four children in an environment similar to her 1940s and ’50s Miami home — a place splashed in woods, water and summer heat, heavily garnished with mosquitos.

But for better or worse that life is gone, at least for people who welcome a little comfort, live near other people, and dread both old and newer mosquito borne diseases such as yellow fever and dengue fever, but also eastern equine and St. Louis encephalitis and West Nile virus — all capable of being transmitted by some of the more than 40 varieties of freshwater mosquito that take on those diseases from birds, and inhabit counties such as Collier, Lee and Charlotte.

“The mosquitos right now, here, are unbelievably absent,” Mrs. Hurchalla notes, comparing what Florida is capable of producing in mosquito misery to other places she’s been — camping in the Okefenokee Swamp on the Florida-Georgia state line, or navigating stretches of the Amazon River, or even traveling in the wet summertime high country of Utah’s Rocky Mountains.

“In my opinion Florida can have the worst mosquitos in the world, because it’s hot and wet — but not too hot,” she concludes. “This is the Goldilocks place for mosquitos.”

New world

But the communities and some of the challenges facing mosquito control districts are different, and so are the costs and resources. What isn’t different is the persistence and survivability of mosquitos, even faced with the newest technologies to stop them, and the basic notions echoed by mosquito control officials: one, larvicide is more effective than adulticide or spraying mosquitos hatched and flying from either ground or air. Two, eradicating mosquitos will never be possible. And three, controlling them is a significant factor, along with clean water, in maintaining a robust tourist economy.

“So here, we’re we’re a pretty heavy larvicide program,” explains Steven Fazekas, an environmental analyst in Palm Beach County’s Mosquito Control District.

“We don’t have salt marsh production like in the southwest. In the 1960s the salt marsh was a bigger issue here — much of what they did was work along the Intracoastal Waterway.

“But now we have all these developments pushing against the Everglades, and a lot of what we do involves freshwater mosquitos. They can transmit a variety of diseases and they adapt to live near people. We see a lot of container breeding.”

The county uses eight inspectors and six office staff, a fleet of larviciding vehicles, and the ability to contract airplanes that spray about five times a year, he says.

Cities such as Palm Beach Gardens also have spraying operations — there, several times a year just before major outdoor holidays such as Labor Day.

The budget for all the county operation — just over $3 million, Mr. Fazekas says —also is the budget for Charlotte County’s Mosquito Control District, even though the county contains only about 12% of the Palm Beach County human population.

But the number of humans is not as important as the numbers and kind of mosquitos — countless representatives of both fresh and saltwater species.

“We have 40-some species and we’re actively trying to control about 25 at any one time,” says Mr. Schermerhorn, director of Charlotte County Mosquito Control, with eight full-time staff and five seasonal workers, along with trucks and all-terrain vehicles equipped to spray, and one Bell UH-12 helicopter that can be supplemented by a sheriff ’s department ’copter in time of need.

Like the counties south of Charlotte, they face mosquitos with significantly different cycles.

“The salt marshes have a lot of larvae, but once they flood and fish get in there, there’s less pressure for us from salt marshes,” Mr. Schermerhorn says.

“As the rainy season comes, in the lowlands in some of the parks and state lands bordering Lee County around Babcock Ranch, there’s a lot of sheet flow and water than stands only an inch or so, and a lot of waters to our north that breed Culex species — many many types.

“So at any point in time, we could treat different kinds in two different parts of the county. It’s challenging. In fact, it’s becoming an issue (trying to) verify complaints from residents. Last week we were averaging 100 complaints per computer and 180 a day via telephone lines. All are geo-identified and placed in our database.”

Then the fun starts, and it starts in any of the districts with both chickens — so-called sentinel chickens kept and tested to see if mosquitos bearing diseases dangerous to humans are biting them — and good old landing rate tests.

“If we do a landing rate test in the county, we’re looking for six mosquitos to land on the lower half of a person’s body in one minute,” Mr. Schermerhorn explains.

“If we get 15 or more, that’s justification for an aerial application.”

Landing rate testers in Collier County wear shorts and a polo shirt and have to go out at night with headlamps, because some of the more worrisome species operate only at night.

One might think they hold high-paying jobs given the level of discomfort possible in the work — but no.

“Actually,” says Mr. Linn, “it’s on the low end of our pay scale.”

That’s true back in Charlotte County, too. But there are other ways of testing.

“If we set pit traps in a location overnight, getting 25 in a trap is enough for a ground application,” Mr. Schermerhorn notes. “But if we get 70 or more, that’s evidence enough to do an aerial application.”

Mosquito control districts now offer sophisticated and usually very quick response services to residents who call or go online to cite problem areas or mosquito hatches. But people can help themselves, too.

John Meier, a professor and entomologist at the University of Miami’s Miller School of Medicine Department of Public Health Sciences, offered this advice in a written statement for those anxious to protect themselves from mosquito types that can spread West Nile virus and Dengue fever:

“Culex and Aedes mosquitoes can develop in their immature stages in various types of standing water. The Culex are generalists using a wide range of aquatic habitats, such as storm drains, ditches, roadside standing water, and all types of containers holding water. The Aedes are specialists depending mostly on container habitats, such as buckets, flowerpots, containers in yards, bromeliad plants, and storm drains. Residents can take action around their homes by removing or emptying containers holding water.”

Mrs. Hurchalla has some self-help advice, too — advice she got as a child and gave her children, in turn, even if most people now won’t need it unless they find themselves on the edge of the ’Glades some hapless summer night.

“I rarely slap mosquitos one at a time, I brush them off. You can get yourself bruised if you’re in a bad place and you start slapping. It’s not as if there aren’t 100 more.” ¦

In the KNOW

Who to call

For information or service requests to kill mosquitos, go here:

Charlotte County: 941-764- 4370, or www.charlottecountyfl.gov/departments/public-works/mosquito-aquatic-weed/

Collier County: 239-436-1000, or www.cmcd.org/contact-information/

Lee County: 239-694-2174, or www.lcmcd.com/service-request/

Palm Beach County: 561-967 6480, or www.discover.pbcgov.org/erm/Pages/MosquitoService-Request.aspx

 

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