We need more blood supply to feed our mosquitoes

By Steve Estes

Put aside the economic ramifications. Put aside the dating ramifications for the single folks. Put aside the calm. Put aside the peaceful ambiance.

Put aside all those other factors.

There is one overwhelming reason to bring more tourists back to town.

More people equates to more targets for the local mosquitos.

I don’t think it’s just me, but it seems like there are more mosquitos attacking the local populace this year than in any recent year in my failing memory.

And during one particularly weird period of conversation recently, we came to the conclusion that there really aren’t more mosquitos. There are simply fewer targets for the mosquitos we have.

Take for instance the mosquito that lands on the back of your hand at every inopportune moment.

If you’re able to get your other hand free to swat the pesky creature, you leave it in a small puddle of blood on your knuckles. Suddenly you feel yourself surrounded by an entire army of the flying critters.

Our theory was this: When you swat one mosquito, the nearest eyewitness mosquito immediately spreads the word to the rest of the clan and they come buzzing in for the funeral as you brush the offending creature from your skin onto the floor, ground or whatever surface happens to be closest.

Of course, as with any self-respecting mosquito, they come to the funeral hungry, so they stop on the way and munch on whatever accommodating human being they can find.

Since we have a dearth of tourists right about now, and it’s way too early for the snowbirds to be piling back into town, what we have is a diminished population of humans for the mosquitos to choose from. Ergo, instead of the normal 10 or 20 mosquito clansmen coming in for the ceremony, we now have 80 to 100 clansmen coming in for the delivery of the death rites.

And since there aren’t three tourists for every local, those higher numbers of bugs have fewer choices. As a result, we have to bat away that many more flying bugs.

Of course, that particular semi-lucid period of conversation may have absolutely no bearing on why it seems that I’m getting tagged by more mosquitos this year than in recent memory.

It just might be that we have a lot more standing water after the recent rains, thus giving rise to more mosquito breeding grounds. More breeding grounds gives rise to more eggs hatching, and living as we do in the middle of the Key Deer Refuge where plant life is plentiful, it probably makes for a proportionately higher mosquito population.

And the next to last thought on the subject is that is only seems like there are more mosquitos running around right now than I remember from years previous because I haven’t seen a Mosquito Control truck in my neighborhood in the last year.

I’m told that the trucks won’t be spraying my neighborhood anytime soon and that we’ll try to control the pests using larvicide techniques and by eradicating standing water in local yards.

Good luck with that one.

As the rains have increased, and the instances of standing water in low-lying areas has increased, the number of trips from the spray truck has decreased.

Lack of spray truck trips. Increase in mosquitos. Hmmmmmm. Probably some correlation there.

And of course, the last thought on the subject is that it seems there are more mosquitos this year than in recent memory because my memory isn’t near as good as it was a year ago. Seems the older I get, the less I remember from the previous year. I can remember hiding in the bushes from my family as an eight-year-old child with chicken pox (I’ll tell that story some other time), or getting shot in the butt with a BB gun when I was six, or walking down a dirt road to school in California when I was five, but I can’t remember if there was a flood of mosquitos just last year.

Now what was I was talking about?

Can anyone tell me?