The arrival of the Aedes Egypti mosquito in 2015 was a game-changer for vector control issues in California. The invasive species is multiplying rapidly, experts say, and impacting residents’ quality of life.
The mosquito, informally known as the “ankle-biter,” is now in every city in Orange County. It has taken over LA’s San Fernando Valley. It’s tiny, which makes it stealthy. It prefers human blood over birds’. It bites multiple times, is active in daylight, and is more likely to come and live indoors. It can transmit disease and it only needs a pool of water the size of a bottle cap to breed.
Where the Aedes is most active, it’s not uncommon to hear people contemplating a move to another county or state. But the Aedes is resilient and there’s no guarantee that it won’t eventually follow.
There’s some good news for those of us who’ve been eaten alive this summer. Experts are working feverishly to control the ankle-biter population and there are two new technologies that may hold promise.
The first strategy is already being employed by Orange County Vector Control. Drones carrying VectoBac GS, a bacteria that kills mosquito larvae, are being deployed at Huntington Beach’s Harriett Wieder Regional Park, Costa Mesa’s Fairview wetlands, the San Joaquin Marsh near UC Irvine and water-recycling basins in Santa Margarita.
An even more interesting technology is currently being developed by researchers at UC San Diego, City News Service reports.
The new precision-guided sterile insect technique, or pgSIT, alters genes linked to male fertility — creating sterile offspring — and female flight in Aedes aegypti, the mosquito species responsible for spreading wide- ranging diseases including dengue fever, chikungunya and Zika."PgSIT is a new scalable genetic control system that uses a CRISPR- based approach to engineer deployable mosquitoes that can suppress populations," said Omar Akbari, UCSD biological sciences professor. "Males don't transmit diseases so the idea is that as you release more and more sterile males, you can suppress the population without relying on harmful chemicals and insecticides."
The technology is somewhat similar to what was deployed against the Mediterranean fruit flies that wreaked havoc on the state throughout the 1980s.
The researchers are still perfecting the technology. While they’re working in the lab, we’ll be eliminating standing water, lighting up the citronella, and covering ourselves in DEET from head to toe.