Hope for the tropics? A company in the US proposes to combat mosquitoes with… 600,000 mosquitoes
Todd Montgomery removes the cap from a small tube and releases hundreds of mosquitoes into the yard of a suburban home outside Washington.
This isn’t a bad thing. They’re male mosquitoes that don’t bite and carry an intestinal bacterium called Wolbachia. When these males mate with uninfected females, the eggs don’t hatch.
It is the first initiative of its kind to reach residential homes in the United States, with 600,000 tiger mosquitoes (Aedes albopictus) to be released throughout the region by the end of summer.
“With climate change, we are facing a ticking time bomb,” Montgomery, 32, founder of Bee Safe Mosquito Control, told AFP.
Rising temperatures have increased the number of warm, humid days across most of the United States, lengthening the season in which disease-carrying insects thrive.
The treatment, sold as “ZAP Males,” only affects tiger mosquitoes. Although not native to the region, they are vectors of diseases such as dengue. This is a growing concern after the first locally acquired case of the disease in Northern Virginia was confirmed this week.
A former electrical engineer, Montgomery, founded the company in 2023 with the intention of eliminating pesticide spraying from residential gardens.
Treatment effectiveness
It is also a priority for their clients, who view fumigation with suspicion, since it uses pesticides that have even been classified as possible human carcinogens.
Sandra Marquardt, a 67-year-old breast cancer survivor, says she would never spray her property with pesticides, but admits she felt envious of her neighbors who did.
“We have a beautiful garden, and I used to plant it in May or June and basically forget about it until October,” he says about the mosquito problem.
But he assures that the intervention involving mosquitoes carrying Wolbachia “has been surprisingly effective.”
The bacteria occur naturally in mosquitoes. But scientists have discovered that it can be exploited: if the male has the bacteria but the female does not, or has a different strain, sterilization occurs.
25 customers have signed up for Bee Safe Mosquito Control. Each will receive 1,500 mosquitoes per week for 16 weeks (four months). That’s a total of 600,000 insects.
International comparison
Singapore has the largest deployment in the public sector, with Project Wolbachia, which began in 2016 and currently releases more than 10 million mosquitoes per week.
A study published in the New England Journal of Medicine found a significant decrease in the Aedes aegypti population, reducing the risk of dengue by more than 70%.
However, not all of Montgomery‘s clients have seen immediate results.
April Chunko, 44, a resident of Silver Spring, told AFP that she “joined immediately” the project, given her distrust of harsh chemicals as a mother of a young child.
“We have a sandbox that he loves, but it’s very difficult to enjoy the space because the mosquitoes are constantly biting us , ” she says. “I haven’t noticed a big difference yet, but there are also a lot of trees” behind the house.
Marcelo Jacobs-Lorena, an emeritus professor at Johns Hopkins University who studies the subject, says the results can vary depending on local conditions. ” Mosquitoes can migrate with the wind, so it depends on the geography of the environment.”
Furthermore, he advocates another use for Wolbachia. Instead of reducing the mosquito population, he proposes releasing both males and females carrying the same strain of bacteria, so that their eggs hatch normally. In this way, the bacteria would spread throughout the population.
Wolbachia blocks the transmission of diseases such as dengue, Zika, and chikungunya, so “there will still be mosquitoes biting people, but they will not transmit diseases.”
