The City of Winnipeg confirmed it is on the right track with its annual bug battle after teaming up with a University of Winnipeg student who mapped mosquito movement in order to help the city’s fight against the pesky insects.
Martine Balcaen, a second year student in the U of W’s Master of Science, Bioscience, Technology and Public Policy program, spent two summers tracking where adult mosquitoes go once they’re fully grown.
The city currently uses trap counts to determine a fogging schedule, but Balcaen said the counts alone don’t tell the whole story.
“The city and other mosquito control organizations can improve their control strategies so that they target mosquitoes where it’s going to hit them the most,” said Balcaen. “For example, if we know that mosquitoes are going towards wetland ‘A’ we know that we can spray all along the edges of wetland ‘A’ and get our biggest bang for our buck instead of just driving around the streets spraying top to bottom the whole neighbourhood.”
Balcaen conducted research over two summers by setting up breeding cages in St. Norbert, counting the mosquitoes in the cages and spraying blue, fluorescent dust over the cage to mark the insects.
The mosquitoes were released and recaptured at traps within a four kilometre radius of the breeding site. The data was shared with the city of Winnipeg in order to help officials understand how the bugs migrate into the city.
At a meeting of some of the top mosquito experts in Canada and the northern United States being held in Winnipeg this week, the City of Winnipeg’s insect control superintendent Ken Nawolsky said the information gathered shows the city is on the right track with its mosquito control program.
“Generally mosquitoes stay within the site that they emerge, up to about four, five kilometres, but if they’re wind-aided or near river corridors they can migrate as much as 25 kilometres,” said Nawolsky. “It provided us some valuable advice, that if we have a localized mosquito population, the best thing to do is look for the source right there because that’s probably where the mosquitoes are coming from.”
“If we do have some that are outside the city limits, if there’s strong winds, there’s not much we can do about that because they’re going to migrate into the city.”
Nawolsky said the city will know next week whether provincial funding will be cut which would mean shrinking the area it larvicides from 10 kilometres outside city limits to 8 kilometres.
Nawolsky said, pending Transport Canada approval, his crews will start using a drone this summer to better identify where to larvicide.
