THE coalition that wages Florida’s eternal battle against mosquitoes is both fearsome and eclectic. Helicopters and fleets of trucks are used to nix larvae and kill insects on the wing; traps baited with dry ice help to monitor them. There are animate weapons, too. Flocks of sentinel chickens, on which some mosquitoes like to munch, are maintained at strategic locations. Then there are mosquitofish, bug-eyed relatives of the guppy that are deployed in barrels and fountains.
Tropical yet wealthy, Florida is “king of the hill” in the mosquito-control world, says Ron Montgomery, Hillsborough County’s veteran mosquito-buster-in-chief. His team of zappers, and those across Tampa Bay in Pinellas County, are on a new front line of the struggle against Aedes aegypti, one of the species that carries the Zika virus. Local transmission—whereby patients contract the virus in America, rather than bringing it home with them—has mostly been confined to the artsy Wynwood district of Miami and the fleshpot of Miami Beach. But one of Florida’s 46 such cases (so far) was found in Pinellas, in a woman said to have worked in Hillsborough. “Our job is to kill...Continue reading
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