Transcript:

Controlling Mosquitos in CitiesAmbience, Mosquitos Mosquitos are coming to cities in increasing numbers and humans are one of their favorite blood meals. I'm Jim Metzner and this is the Pulse of the Planet.La Deau: Mosquitoes that do well in urban areas tend to be the ones that develop through their larval stages pretty fast, and so they can breed in small containers of water that are likely to stay wet for at least a week. in some places this is this can be a styrofoam cup. Shannon La Deau is a disease ecologist at the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies. She says there are steps we can take to control urban mosquitos and the diseases they may carry. La Deau: When we sample in urban areas that the most productive mosquito habitats tend to be things like old rubber tires and buckets - the bottoms of trash cans. One of the ones that surprises people the most, would be the base to planters that catches water, and that tends to be high nutrient water and it's very shallow. But mosquitoes, especially the tiger mosquitoes, can do really well in that container. The most the most common public health message about how to protect yourself from mosquitoes is make sure that there's no standing water in your yard. The mosquitoes don't fly that far - a hundred meters. So if you're bit in your backyard, you probably bred the mosquito in your backyard or your neighbor's. You just dump the container habitat and they can't breed.The casual litter can be important habitat for mosquitoes, but the actual most productive habitat in the places we work is often the illegally dumped piles of garbage -- things like tires. We sampled a pile of seven toilets for five years in a row - a pile of disposed of toilets. And so these things make very good pond-like habitat in urban areas. It's a great reason to keep cities garbage and litter-free.I'm Jim Metzner and this is the Pulse of the Planet.