The sun always comes out after a storm, but so does a new batch of hungry mosquitoes in the summer. According to Saskatoon city officials, recent weather has created the perfect storm for them to hatch.
“Most of our nuisance mosquitoes respond to sudden and severe rain events. So when we get over 25 mm of rain in a 24-hour period we tend to get spikes in nuisance mosquitoes,” said Jeff Boone, the city’s pest management and urban forestry superintendent.
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Boon explained that nuisance mosquitoes come in large numbers and have painful bites, but don’t carry viruses, compared to vector mosquitoes, which carry diseases like West Nile virus.
Female mosquitoes can lay hundreds of eggs in a ‘raft’, which floats on top of the water, preferably in newly flooded areas so nutrients are available for larvae to eat.
“Generally mosquitoes will lay their eggs around water bodies and then as the water bodies flood, it causes those mosquitoes to hatch. So you can get eggs that have been laid from many previous years hatching when you get sudden and severe rain events,” Boon explained.
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If you’ve been smacking and swatting more than normal these past weeks, there’s a reason.
“Right now the adult mosquitoes that we have are responding to the rain events we had on July 11 and 12. There was quite a bit of precipitation over those couple of days and these are the adults were seeing from that rain event,” Boone said.
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City crews are battling mosquitoes by spraying a biological larvicide on standing bodies of water after heavy rain events like the one Wednesday.
“After rain events that’s when our program is very active to try to control as many mosquitoes as possible. But when we get successive rain events it gets really challenging to control all of the standing water,” Boone said.
The good news is that the influx in mosquitoes isn’t from a species that carried diseases like West Nile virus. Boone says Saskatoon hasn’t had any mosquitoes test positive this year.