Word: mosquitoes
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Sometime this summer -- it's probably already happened -- you will hear that hateful little trump. At the first sound of its intensely annoying whiny hum, faint but frantically high-pitched, you'll hold stock-still, on full alert, hand raised at the ready. And then: splat. One less mosquito to trouble the peace of man and beast...
...brush aside the spindly corpse, the poet's question may occur to you. Why do mosquitoes make that irritating little noise? Its usefulness from the human point of view is obvious. But what is its survival value from the mosquito point of view? Why in the world would these otherwise canny creatures go to the trouble of evolving a behavior so ideally suited to helping their prey find and swat them...
...good place to ponder this puzzle -- or to find out anything else you ever wanted to know about mosquitoes -- is an innocuous-looking brick building near the University of Florida's Gainesville campus. Its halls nourish, among other obscure yet useful twigs of the mighty oak that is the U.S. government, the Mosquito Unit, or, as it is formally known, the Mosquito and Fly Research Unit at the Medical and Veterinary Entomology Research Laboratory of the Agricultural Research Service of the U.S. Department of Agriculture...
This bastion of research in the battle against bugs has never been more important. A new enemy has appeared in the form of the Asian tiger mosquito, a variety that was accidentally imported from Japan in 1985 and has since spread to 21 states, mostly in the Southeast. Government scientists announced last month that a group of these mosquitoes in Florida had been found to be carrying the virus for Eastern equine encephalitis, a rare but often fatal brain disease. Only 11 Floridians have caught this disease, and health officials see no reason for panic, but mosquito control has taken...
Gainesville's Mosquito Unit, along with everybody else involved in what is anthropocentrically called pest control, is rethinking its philosophy and strategy. The mosquitoes are the same, crafty and cunning as ever. But the weapons and tactics used to combat them are changing fast. Chemicals are out; biologicals are in. Dumping poisons indiscriminately is no longer in vogue; figuring out ecologically correct ways to get mosquitoes to do themselves in is all the rage. "The era of insecticides is coming to an end," says Donald Barnard, the Mosquito Unit's chief. "They're still our first line of defense...