Locally most of the nature trails are built thru swamps (aka eco warriors holy wetlands). They're economically worthless, so they make nice parks and trails.
The point of the article is they can't fly faster than 2 mph or so. Simply move faster than 2 MPH. I've ridden my bicycle thru swamps and not gotten bit.
I also hike and between walking and a bit of wind there is not much problem as long as I don't stop.
I staple a blue plastic cup to the top of a walking staff and coat the cup with a layer of tanglefoot. It's like a fly magnet. In the thick of the season I might catch 75 in an outing. This guy had it figured out years ago, http://nfrec.ifas.ufl.edu/MizellRF/deer-fly-testimonial.htm
Midges in the Scottish Highlands are so sensitive to wind that the act of hiking itself creates enough of a breeze to prevent them from biting.
As I found out first-hand this week: just keep walking.
[Additional: Avon Skin-so-Soft seems to prevent midges from surviving a landing, but I didn't find anything to beat larger clegs/horseflies except a good slapping - they will bite through clothing]
I would say this has been common knowledge for at least a generation or two in India. It also helps to remove sweat and the salt residue from the skin, i.e take a bath in the evening and stay cool.
Wow, really love that electronic mosquito bat! My girlfriend is a human version of a (mosquito-killing) HK-Aerial, and this seems like a good way to avoid some of the handprints-on-mirrors and bloodsplats-on-the-walls that can at times plague our pint-sized apartment.
I have a feeling she'd have a blast with this weapon. Thanks!
Is the electric thing a gimmick, or is there science behind it? I sometimes dispose of annoying houseflies using a racquetball racket. No electricity, but fast moving nylon strings take care of the flies nicely.
They're great fun. I live in Austin, TX and we have several in the house. They obliterate mosquitoes with a satisfying "POP" noise. The mosquitoes literally explode into tiny pieces when you hit them with the bat. It's awesome (especially when you are like me--I can get 20+ bites on a single night while wearing insect repellent, where everyone else around me is fine, and I use the bats as revenge. :)
I learned this on a trip to Nepal many years ago. Turn on the overhead fan in your room and the mosquitos never get a chance to land. Of course you wake up with cotton mouth and eyes, but it was worth it.
I've tried this and it didn't work for me at all. Mosquitos love my wife, so she rubbed the dryer sheet on her exposed skin. Result: completely covered in mosquito bites.
This is the standard procedure in Sri Lanka as well, when people aren't lighting those poison coils (because some people still don't have indoor fans) or putting on the mosquito net when sleeping.
My wife figured this out, though both of us should have known. We visited my in-laws in rural Georgia and our 17-month old son was covered in gnats and mosquitos when we went outside so we limited his time. When we went to the beach, there were no insects and my wife said, "must be the breeze. We should get a fan for our porch when we get home" Luckily she is smart or my son would suffer a lot!
Does anyone have a recommendation for a good outdoor fan - something you could leave out on your deck and that would be weather resistant? Does such a thing exist?
I've just used vanilla extract before.. it doesn't take much, treat it like cologne. It smells much better than bug sprays and you don't have any weird residue.
I always assumed mosquitoes are going by the IR/heat emissions, but apparently they follow smell. They also have very rudimentary olfactory system, which is easy to confuse by filling the area with a smell "override". It could be a bug spray or a citrus smell (citronella, etc) or it could be a smell that humans don't even pick up. Latter is weird, but it works really well - it's a small plastic dispenser bottle with a wick and heater element on top, just like an oil-based air freshener, but it has no smell whatsoever.
I've known this trick for years. Whenever I visit India, especially during the monsoon season, you always turn on the overhead fan (especially when you sleep). That's it - no more trouble from mosquitoes! It also keeps you cool because sometimes the nights can be warm.
I've thought about that, but mosquito's are small and hard to detect. You'd need quite a high resolution camera (or realistically two, to compensate for the parallax between the camera and the laser) combined with some serious software to spot mosquitos at the other end of the room.
Yes, but apparently by limiting the detection area to a rectangular segment of a plane (or a photonic fence, as they call it). Don't get me wrong, what they did is pretty cool and I could imagine placing something like that near a window, but it's still less useful than a system that has a 360 degree field of view.
I've emailed three times, and have called leaving numerous voicemails asking to license this technology. Not once have I ever been called or emailed back.
Does it count as "invented" if they don't bring an actual product to market at all? If anything, that sounds like they anti-invented it - no one else can create one without their permission.
I had to get too tree huggy but mosquitos are a pretty key food source for others. So a fan is great in that it works well and doesn't do too much harm to the food chain.
I know, but does that really feel right? Sort of the height of arrogance to me. "Let's take something super prevalent and remove it entirely and I'm sure we'll have a zero sum gain" Maybe it's true though.
What's the purpose of being human, if not to believe your species is morally superior to all others? ;-)
On a serious note, though, I would like to see the human race reach the level of modeling and engineering sophistication to be able to eradicate mosquitoes with no harm to ourselves or the species we depend on. We've basically eradicated numerous microscopic species, and accidentally driven some very large species to extinction; we might as well do it to mosquitoes. Think of how great it would be to eliminate malaria and all other mosquito-borne illnesses.
I would love it too. I spent some time working on one, ten or so years ago. I have forgotten the actual power measurements but I came to the conclusion that a laser powerful enough to kill a mosquito in the ~10 ms my tracking system was able to locate it would be too dangerous to leave running with people around, because even if my "never shoot when there might be a human in the background" algorithm worked perfectly (ha!), even just a stray reflection off a nearby shiny surface would be enough to potentially cause permanent eye damage.
Microcontrollers have improved dramatically since then, so perhaps it would be possible to track mosquito flight instead of just scanning for mosquitos and blasting away whenever one shows up in your crosshairs, but unfortunately we'll never see any commercial applications now that Intellectual Ventures has stuck their toe in. Might be fun to try it again as an open source hack project, though...
This has been used for at least 25 years in Paris Island, SC chowhalls.
The doors to the chowhall stay open throughout the meal as recruits stand in formation and slowly make their way through to the actual foodlines. As a recruit making your way through, there's a period where you are the meal for lots of no-see-ums. Then there's the divine fan period (I was there during the dead of summer, and it was flippin' hot!). Then there's the "see and smell the food" period. Ah, the memories...
Mosquitoes in the US used to be mostly Aedes, but now there are a lot of Culex, which fly twice as fast (120cm/s, or about 2.7 mph) and are better hunters. The Aedes come into a room, find a wall, and eventually eat, while Culex go straight for the bite. Both of them tend to fly upwind toward meals. I wonder whether fans blow the close mosquitoes away but draw lots more to the area, in search of that good human-food smell the fan disperses.
When I was in college dorm (in China), I used to put a table lamp on the floor, turned toward my feet and legs, which was fairly effective. Mosquitoes don't like lights.
Spend a summer up in the Yukon or Alaska if you want to see solid walls of ravenous mosquitoes.
I get bitten while riding my bike, bitten while my arm is out of the car window driving at 30km/h, and bitten through jeans. 100% DEET (you can get it in Alaska) does the trick for about 30 minutes before you have to re-apply - and it's nasty stuff.
This past weekend I was camping at a music festival and slapped my arm casually, and killed 14 mosquitoes with the one slap.....
A fan? That will do nothing.
The mosquitoes will mostly be gone in another month, then it's No CM and black fly season, until it gets below freezing in ~September.
> The higher up you go, the colder it is to the point you don't get that many insects at all.
My experience doesn't completely agree with that.
Everything up to and including the Brooks Range was horrendous for mosquitoes in summer, same over on the Dempster Highway in Canada. Once you get within ~60 miles of the Arctic Ocean the temperature does drop enough to get rid of them, but before that it's a nightmare.
The mosquitoes are pretty rough up on the north slope. They're even worse than the Anchorage area (and bigger, too). Anywhere there's lots of standing fresh water, you'll have mosquitoes in the summer in Alaska.
The wind does make a huge difference though. If it's windy, there's more or less no problem. It's when the wind lies down that they come out in force.
The mosquitoes are bad enough that blood loss due to insect bites is a major contributing factor to caribou calf mortality, believe it or not. The caribou actually seek out drilling pads because they're elevated (~10 feet) enough to catch a breeze and get "out of the swamp", which helps keep the mosquitoes down. Thus the pictures you'll often see (yay, PR spin) of caribou swarming oil production facilities on the north slope.
I remember going to Denali in high school and the mosquitoes you have up there in Alaska shouldn't even considered in the same genus as the mosquitos most people deal with.
It is a shame that one of safest and most effective pesticides used to control mosquitoes and other disease-carrying insects, DDT, is no longer permitted in most countries.
From what I recall reading on earlier HN threads mentioning DDT, it was linked to reproductive harm in birds (softer/weaker shells), and insects started building up a resistance anyway.
That's correct, and moreover, DDT is not even banned if used for things like stopping disease-carrying mosquitos. The Stockholm Convention explicitly allows for that use[1].
This is usually brought up as a weird rallying point for people with an ax to grind with Silent Spring, nevermind the very real effects of DDT and nevermind the exemptions explicitly dealing with the objections raised.
> 100% DEET (you can get it in Alaska) does the trick for about 30 minutes before you have to re-apply
July evening mosquitoes in Western Siberia tundra plains land onto and bite even freshly DEET-ed skin :)
> black fly season
1cm long - nah, 2 cm long - painful, yet usually can't get through clothes, 3 cm long - get you even through clothes like jeans, really painful and blood doesn't clot oozing through a 3mm razor cut.
I agree. I don't think the author has been to India. I lived in Hyderabad, and the mosquito's there were super fast and super aggressive. Fans? Hah.
Before sleeping, I'd close all the windows and doors and spray the toxic anti-mosquito product. After half an hour, I'd go in and find all the fallen mosquito's and squish them, since they weren't actually dead, just stunned. After a while they would just get up and fly away if I didn't do anything. Then, I'd use an electric zapper to find the remaining ones which were unaffected by the spray.
Then, before sleeping I'd light a mosquito repellent, and also apply a mosquito repellent to my hands and feet to keep them away.
Only the above regimen worked. Skipping any of the above meant I'd be slapping away angry buzzing mosquito's the rest of the night.
Fans wouldn't do jack to slow them down. The only other thing which was semi-effective was cooling down the room with an AC. They seemed to get a bit slow then.
The Vietnamese figured this out long ago. Here all the cafes and outdoor restaurants have fans. They help with the heat too, of course, but also cut down on the bites.
I found 95% concentrations of DEET effective during multiple trips paddling in northern Canada. The alternative was to come back with inflamed skin easy an inch thick.
Buy the 05% DEET in the USA as Canada no longer allows concentrations over 30%.
I was expecting something that could be used in the developing world. It seems that solar power fans could be provided reasonably cheaply, maybe even made locally (apart from the solar cells) from "recycled" (dumped) materials from the west.
heh, you bet ! When I read the article, I was like FFS ! You've got to be kidding me ! Is this really on the NY-effing-times ! ...but then I read the comments ...ah well, first world ignorance of ^low-tech^ solutions. Next thing you know somebody would be 'discovering' water is good to fight dehydration ! :)
Didn't someone come up with a blend of things (poison and flower scents) that claimed to eradicate every mosquito in a X mile radius? Whatever happened of that? Why haven't we been able to make something that'll attract large amounts of them and kill them?
Because mosquitos have one of the most powerful cabals of blood sucker lobbyists in Washington. They tend to just swarm anyone left out in the open and drain them of any resolve.
This article in MotherEarthNews had a commenter who stated that this trap also attracted other insects, including bees (which the boric acid is also fatal to). So, even if it is effective, unfortunately it seems that it's too indiscriminate.
This is a godsend, and so blatant an alternative. It will be nice to not spend the rest of the summer duking it out with these buggers for control of the porch.
Estate design in the colonial and antebellum Southeast, where malaria was a huge problem until the 20th century, was arguably designed to maximize breezes and drafts: be on hilltops, surrounded by mostly open lawns without much shade, with tall, open windows.
Maximizing breeze was actually more about keeping cool than getting rid of mosquitos. Besides, sometimes the breeze would die down and you've got the same old problem. Mosquito nets were available back then :
It isn't very well absorbed through the skin so it has an extremely low toxicity when used in this way, as long as you don't breathe it in or let it get on your skin while it's still wet. It's much more effective and less toxic than DEET, and the CDC recommends it to prevent tick infections. Also don't ever mix it with DEET, because the combination is neurotoxic.
The military actually pretreats all of their combat uniforms in this stuff to prevent malaria and other diseases.
> Also don't ever mix it with DEET, because the combination is neurotoxic.
Holy crap. I must know 100 people who regularly wear Permethrin-treated clothes and then spray on DEET repellent. I had no idea it was dangerous.
(FWIW, I avoid them both due to general conservatism when it comes to toxic chemicals, especially when the stakes are low -- i.e., the worst-case is itching and not malaria.)
I started doing it only because I've already gotten bitten by two ticks this year and have found another half dozen on me. I'm only outside a few hours a week collecting mushrooms though, I'm not lying with it pressed against my skin for ten hours straight in a hunting blind or doing anything that would cause me to sweat excessively. But yeah, at least in the Northeast it's gotten to the point where going out into the woods wearing shorts is probably far more dangerous than having unprotected sex with random people, at least as far as we can tell based on the limited tick infection statistics.
The tick problem in the Northeast USA seems to vary wildly every year. I've lived here my whole life (31 years, in the southern New Hampshire area) and I've seen tick populations fluctuate drastically from one year to the next.
A few years ago it was particularly bad: I went camping on my dad's land in northern New Hampshire one weekend and we had literally a dozen ticks crawling up our legs within five minutes of arriving. When I awoke in my tent the next morning, the outside of the tent had dozens of ticks clinging to the outside netting, trying to get in. It was impossible to walk anywhere without getting several ticks on you. None of us, including my dad who has lived here 60+ years, has seen it that bad.
In contrast, we were up at the same area a few weekends ago and we spent three days walking through the woods, camping out, and wearing shorts the whole time. The three of us had a total of 2 ticks the entire weekend.
I'm very curious to know what's influencing their numbers.
“Lyme disease is the only infection I know of where we have a safe and effective vaccine, but it’s not available to the public,” says Dr. Allen Steere, the physician who uncovered the disease:
The most common "bad case" scenario in North America is lyme disease. It's easy to treat if caught early, but is disabling in the late stages (possible outcomes include psychosis).
I don't think it is common for it to get bad, but catching it at all is relatively common if you spend much time in nature around the northeast corridor.
Many genera of mosquitoes _can_ spread disease: anopheles, aedes, culex, culiseta. Your risk depends on where you are, how often you're bitten, the prevalence of infection among mosquitoes, etc etc.
> Also don't ever mix [permethrin] with DEET, because the combination is neurotoxic.
Do you have a citation for that? It's well known that permethrin is a neurotoxin to fish and cats, but I've never heard of this DEET+permethrin combination.
Years ago my buddy took a tour of the Amazon. His guide took them to a tree, ripped the bark off, exposing a den of termites. The guide instructed everyone to grab a handful of termites, smash them up, and wipe the resulting guts on their exposed arms and faces.
4 year olds from India are not the target audience of the New York Times. It's a good thing when something known to one culture is shared with another.
yeah.. but I'd expect a publication of such reputation to dig deeper than that. The ideas mentioned don't even scratch the surface. Hence the reference to "4 year olds".
194 comments
[ 2.4 ms ] story [ 250 ms ] threadThe point of the article is they can't fly faster than 2 mph or so. Simply move faster than 2 MPH. I've ridden my bicycle thru swamps and not gotten bit.
I also hike and between walking and a bit of wind there is not much problem as long as I don't stop.
A bug in the eye still hurts... wear sunglasses.
I haven't tried them.
http://www.purpleturtle.co.uk/acatalog/Protective_Clothing.h...
As I found out first-hand this week: just keep walking.
[Additional: Avon Skin-so-Soft seems to prevent midges from surviving a landing, but I didn't find anything to beat larger clegs/horseflies except a good slapping - they will bite through clothing]
I have a feeling she'd have a blast with this weapon. Thanks!
It's pretty high on the satisfaction scale though....
The poor critters wouldn't stand a chance.
Oddly enough, Intellectual Ventures invented this.
#PatentTrolls
EDIT: You may want to watch it - leaving a voicemail is a form of podcasting. You're really opening yourself up to liability here.
http://www.nature.com/news/2010/100721/full/466432a.html
On a serious note, though, I would like to see the human race reach the level of modeling and engineering sophistication to be able to eradicate mosquitoes with no harm to ourselves or the species we depend on. We've basically eradicated numerous microscopic species, and accidentally driven some very large species to extinction; we might as well do it to mosquitoes. Think of how great it would be to eliminate malaria and all other mosquito-borne illnesses.
Humans aren't magically bad, and what we do isn't automatically terrible for everything. It's possible for us to understand what we're doing.
Microcontrollers have improved dramatically since then, so perhaps it would be possible to track mosquito flight instead of just scanning for mosquitos and blasting away whenever one shows up in your crosshairs, but unfortunately we'll never see any commercial applications now that Intellectual Ventures has stuck their toe in. Might be fun to try it again as an open source hack project, though...
The doors to the chowhall stay open throughout the meal as recruits stand in formation and slowly make their way through to the actual foodlines. As a recruit making your way through, there's a period where you are the meal for lots of no-see-ums. Then there's the divine fan period (I was there during the dead of summer, and it was flippin' hot!). Then there's the "see and smell the food" period. Ah, the memories...
I get bitten while riding my bike, bitten while my arm is out of the car window driving at 30km/h, and bitten through jeans. 100% DEET (you can get it in Alaska) does the trick for about 30 minutes before you have to re-apply - and it's nasty stuff.
This past weekend I was camping at a music festival and slapped my arm casually, and killed 14 mosquitoes with the one slap.....
A fan? That will do nothing.
The mosquitoes will mostly be gone in another month, then it's No CM and black fly season, until it gets below freezing in ~September.
This is mostly a problem further South and West in Alaska. The higher up you go, the colder it is to the point you don't get that many insects at all.
My experience doesn't completely agree with that.
Everything up to and including the Brooks Range was horrendous for mosquitoes in summer, same over on the Dempster Highway in Canada. Once you get within ~60 miles of the Arctic Ocean the temperature does drop enough to get rid of them, but before that it's a nightmare.
The wind does make a huge difference though. If it's windy, there's more or less no problem. It's when the wind lies down that they come out in force.
The mosquitoes are bad enough that blood loss due to insect bites is a major contributing factor to caribou calf mortality, believe it or not. The caribou actually seek out drilling pads because they're elevated (~10 feet) enough to catch a breeze and get "out of the swamp", which helps keep the mosquitoes down. Thus the pictures you'll often see (yay, PR spin) of caribou swarming oil production facilities on the north slope.
sorry.
http://www.thelocal.se/40512/20120427/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DDT#Use_in_the_1940s_and_1950s
I'm absolutely not an expert but I was under the general impression that DDT is no longer permitted because it's not safe.
This is usually brought up as a weird rallying point for people with an ax to grind with Silent Spring, nevermind the very real effects of DDT and nevermind the exemptions explicitly dealing with the objections raised.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DDT#Restrictions_on_usage
July evening mosquitoes in Western Siberia tundra plains land onto and bite even freshly DEET-ed skin :)
> black fly season
1cm long - nah, 2 cm long - painful, yet usually can't get through clothes, 3 cm long - get you even through clothes like jeans, really painful and blood doesn't clot oozing through a 3mm razor cut.
Before sleeping, I'd close all the windows and doors and spray the toxic anti-mosquito product. After half an hour, I'd go in and find all the fallen mosquito's and squish them, since they weren't actually dead, just stunned. After a while they would just get up and fly away if I didn't do anything. Then, I'd use an electric zapper to find the remaining ones which were unaffected by the spray. Then, before sleeping I'd light a mosquito repellent, and also apply a mosquito repellent to my hands and feet to keep them away.
Only the above regimen worked. Skipping any of the above meant I'd be slapping away angry buzzing mosquito's the rest of the night.
Fans wouldn't do jack to slow them down. The only other thing which was semi-effective was cooling down the room with an AC. They seemed to get a bit slow then.
Have you tried it though? Seems like you're dismissing it out of hand.
edit: and having read the rest of the comments it seems like fans are widely used in India in Vietnam to combat mosquitoes.
Buy the 05% DEET in the USA as Canada no longer allows concentrations over 30%.
Would it have any useful benefit over bed nets?
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/27/health/27mosquito.html
http://www.motherearthnews.com/diy/homemade-mosquito-trap-zm...
http://www.nottoway.com/html/nottoway-plantation-history.htm
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aia/part4/4i3101.html
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W3sGvZE3rh4
It isn't very well absorbed through the skin so it has an extremely low toxicity when used in this way, as long as you don't breathe it in or let it get on your skin while it's still wet. It's much more effective and less toxic than DEET, and the CDC recommends it to prevent tick infections. Also don't ever mix it with DEET, because the combination is neurotoxic.
The military actually pretreats all of their combat uniforms in this stuff to prevent malaria and other diseases.
Holy crap. I must know 100 people who regularly wear Permethrin-treated clothes and then spray on DEET repellent. I had no idea it was dangerous.
(FWIW, I avoid them both due to general conservatism when it comes to toxic chemicals, especially when the stakes are low -- i.e., the worst-case is itching and not malaria.)
A few years ago it was particularly bad: I went camping on my dad's land in northern New Hampshire one weekend and we had literally a dozen ticks crawling up our legs within five minutes of arriving. When I awoke in my tent the next morning, the outside of the tent had dozens of ticks clinging to the outside netting, trying to get in. It was impossible to walk anywhere without getting several ticks on you. None of us, including my dad who has lived here 60+ years, has seen it that bad.
In contrast, we were up at the same area a few weekends ago and we spent three days walking through the woods, camping out, and wearing shorts the whole time. The three of us had a total of 2 ticks the entire weekend.
I'm very curious to know what's influencing their numbers.
http://www.wbur.org/2012/06/27/lyme-vaccine
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tick-borne_disease
EDIT: Seems like some North American ticks can kill you with their neurotoxins.
I don't think it is common for it to get bad, but catching it at all is relatively common if you spend much time in nature around the northeast corridor.
Do you have a citation for that? It's well known that permethrin is a neurotoxin to fish and cats, but I've never heard of this DEET+permethrin combination.
Journal of Toxicology and Environmental Health; Volume 48, Issue 1, 1996
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/009841096161456
I also opt for Picaridan over DEET. Doesn't feel as nasty on your skin.
That setup kept me bite-free for three months in Southeast Asia and India.