"Immunity" to mosquitoes.

[Doug Yanega]

Ken Philip wrote:

>In the 1970s, a mosquito specialist spent some time at Sagwon, on the
>Alaskan North Slope, at the peak of mosquito season. He was doing a test
>on one of the ultrasonic 'mosquito repellers' (which he found actually
>was a weak _attractant_, though the results probably weren't significant).
>In the course of that project, he measured the number of bites he got on
>the back of his hand in five minutes--and then extrapolated to the follow-
>ing conclusion: if you were stripped naked and tied to a stake at Sagwon,
>you would die of loss of blood in 2.5 hours.

Interestingly along these lines, I recently was contacted by someone who
has apparently *FINALLY* developed an honest-to-goodness mosquito trap that
ONLY kills mosquitoes, and kills them by the thousands. If the data is to
be believed (and I have no reason to think it's faked), then every outdoor
UV bug zapper in the world should be tossed in the trash and replaced with
one of these CO2-emitting beauties.
The test results are at http://www.mosquitosolutions.com/test.htm, and
indicate that a single trap can haul in over 7000 skeeters a night, with an
incidental bycatch of maybe 40 non-mosquitoes: the exact *opposite* of a UV
light zapper. So why has it taken so long for someone to develop this?

Peace,


Doug Yanega        Dept. of Entomology         Entomology Research Museum
Univ. of California - Riverside, Riverside, CA 92521
phone: (909) 787-4315 (standard disclaimer: opinions are mine, not UCR's)
                http://insects.ucr.edu/staff/yanega.html
  "There are some enterprises in which a careful disorderliness
        is the true method" - Herman Melville, Moby Dick, Chap. 82