Mosquito Population “Taking Off”

If you think you’ve been hearing a buzzing in your ears a lot more lately, it’s not in your head: it’s all around your head.

With so much rain recently, there is standing water in places that usually dry out quickly. And Georgia Extension Service entomologist Elmer Gray says that’s the problem. “Every place where there’s standing water for up to a week to ten days, you start getting a lot of biological activity: there’s algae and stuff grow,” says Gray. “The female mosquitoes can sense this. They’ll lay their eggs there. The larvae feed on things that are growing in the water, and the mosquito populations take off.”

Gray says mosquitos that carry West Nile virus are not the problem — at least not right now. “The mosquito that primarily transmits West Nile virus, the Southern house mosquito, often develops in the storm drain systems,” says Gray. “And with the heavy rains we’ve been having, the storm drains are constantly being flushed out, so those populations have been suppressed.”

But the height of West Nile season is mid-August through mid-September, so Gray says we are not out of the woods yet.