Marcel Deveny and his kids Lonneke and Yorrick put on insect repellent for a walk in Everglades National Park.
By Mike Clary
Of all the animals in Everglades National Park in Florida with a bite to be avoided — alligators, panthers, pythons — only one is nearly impossible to escape.
Mosquitoes are so thick in this unusually wet, humid summer, park employees sometimes don full bug-suits just to walk the few yards from the parking lot to the office.
Now the park’s reputation as one of the world’s best breeding grounds for the one of the world’s biggest pests is being documented by a team of scientists from Yale University.
“This is frontier research,” said Durland Fish, a Yale professor of epidemiology who studies mosquito-borne illnesses such as West Nile virus and dengue fever. “And it is pretty ironic, since this place is so well known for mosquitoes, that a study like this has never been done before.”
Working with four recent graduates out of a park laboratory on an old missile base this summer, Fish is completing the first systematic study of the park’s signature insect in order to provide baseline data for Everglades restoration efforts and climate change.
Each day researchers set out traps in various park habitats to collect samples. Left overnight, one trap can pick up as many as 30,000 mosquitoes.
In the lab, the students take samples from the traps and use microscopes to identify and catalog them.
“So far we have identified about 30 species, and there may be 30 more out there,” said Fish, 68, who once travelled to a remote corner of Venezuela to discover a mosquito that now bears his name — Wyeomyia fishii.
Although mosquitoes may be no more than a nuisance to most people, they can transmit disease, said Fish, and in their own annoying way, they are just as interesting as mammals or birds. “There are about 3,000 species of mosquitoes in the world, and the more we learn about them the better prepared we are to deal with disease outbreaks,” he said.
A casual study of mosquitoes in the 1.5mn acre park begins at the Royal Palm Visitor Center.
“Oh, they love me, the little horrors,” said Marie Durrand, 52, a tourist from Reading, England, trying not to scratch several large red welts on her legs as she waited for a guided tour one day last week. “If there’s a mosquito around, it will bite me.”
Most arriving tourists jump out of their rental cars and do what the park itself is banned from doing — spray to keep the bugs away, or kill them.
Ben Monfared, 25, and several friends from Germany were enveloped in clouds of aerosol insect repellent as they girded their bare arms and legs before venturing down the Anhinga Trail boardwalk in high-noon heat on a recent day.
Nearby, Marcel Deveny, 41, a native of the Netherlands, was slathering insect repellent and sun screen on his two children, Lonneke, 12, and Yorrick, 10. “We are very excited to see alligators,” he said, “but not mosquitoes so much.”
With a breeze blowing, and away from grassy or shaded areas, visitors can enjoy a summertime visit to the park unmolested by blood-lusting skeeters.
But the researchers working with Fish go to where the mosquitoes are thickest, and some, such as recent Yale ecology graduate Chelsea Savit, pay the price. While placing an insect trap on Snake Bight Trail, Savit wore a nylon jacket and a hood with a mesh face covering.
But her hands were exposed and after about 10 minutes in the mangroves, both were reddened, swollen and itchy. Still, Savit, a 22-year-old from Long Island, is a scientist who appreciates mosquitoes.
“When a mosquito lands on me, I look and identify, and then determine if it’s worth swatting,” said Savit. “Some are really pretty. One has blue metallic stripes. But salt marsh mosquitoes are the biggest pest, and consistently abundant. So I’m going to swat those.”
The billions of mosquitoes in the Everglades are a vital part of the food chain. Only the females bite — they need blood to reproduce — and not all species feed on people. But all can be a bother.
Their impact on visitors is clear. Of Everglades National Park’s 1.4mn visitors in 2012, three-quarters came from November through April. In January 2012, tent campers totaled 2,142. In August that number dropped to nine.
Jimi Sadle, a park botanist, said the Everglades may be harder to appreciate in a steamy summer, but there are rewards. He mentioned orchids in bloom and plenty of crystal-clear water visibly teeming with fish.
Mosquitoes are a harder sell. But, said Sadle, “standing in Snake Bight, the sheer number is impressive. All humming. Where else can you experience this?”
Indeed. Embrace the buzz. — Sun Sentinel/MCT