The Gaming Den

My boss has a summer house near some mosquito-infested woods and has tasked me with devising a solution to "decrease annoyance".

Google results are unfortunately spammed by all sorts of magic solutions. So far I've found this thread, which lists several things that seem to actually work:

• DEET (outdoor use, apply to exposed skin, poisonous, solvent);
• permethrin-soaked nets;
• BTi (drop into breeding pool);
• plug-in toxins (my boss doesn't like these);
• fans.

So, anything else that works? Are there maybe some professional pesticides to spray an area so that it stays safe for resident humans (hopefully keeping grown produce safe, too)?

Get rid of the ponds where the mosquitos breed?

obviously he needs this, but its not quite here despite this video to the contrary.

In the Nam, these are our preferred weapons as they have a high personal satisfaction factor but overall don't really help. Bug zapper lamps generally don't work on mosquitoes unfortunately and are non discriminatory towards other bugs in the area you might not want to be killing.

THis might be worth a try.

I will point out I live on a property with 10 acres of ponds, trees, gardens and water habitat and it has significantly less mosquitoes than most water free gardens in our region.

Mosquitoes do not just live in ponds. They live in temporary water and particular sorts of swamplands.

The problem unfortunately for someone dumb enough to put a holiday house near a mosquito infested environment is one of habitat. And NOTHING you do will solve the problem permanently.

Pesticides, even the most ludicrously irresponsible unethical fucking asshole like and damaging, will at best provide only a temporary solution.

And I mean TEMPORARY mosquito life cycles are FAST. They are also exceedingly opportunistic about breeding up sudden surges in numbers what with you know, temporary water being among their favorite habitat.

And temporary solutions ARE the best case scenario of irresponsibly dumping stupid amounts of chemicals or verminous exotic fishes or what have you into your local fragile swamp ecosystems. Far too often the pesticides, ignoring all the human and bald eagle food chain poisoning business, will actually be outright counter productive to your goals wiping out frogs, small fish, and probably most importantly predatory amphibious insects that have LONGER life cycles than the mosquitoes. We are talking Weeks for the mosquitoes compared to months or even years for many of their most voracious predators. And mosquitoes, again, being opportunists, will only swarm all the harder in the gap you create for them by killing the things that eat them.

The best solutions to mosquitoes in my experience is to actually improve habitat for mosquito eating predators near your house by ADDING permanent water habitat for frogs and dragon flies. But that won't save you from the massive numbers of mosquitoes commuting in from a real swamp and NOTHING WILL.

In that case you have no choice but to learn to live WITH them, or sell the fucking house because nothing will help you. Do NOT go wandering around under heavy shady trees and do not rummage in the shady shrubbery in the day. Do not wander around outside on warm nights or around dusk. Go inside after dark and get yourself a regular non-pesticide mosquito netting for your beds as a simple and highly effective physical barrier. And if you bought up a holiday house in a mosquito infested part of the tropics... ahahahahahahahahaha sucker.

(Oh and my fellow garden fanatics constantly tell me about certain mosquito repellent shrubs, just plant them near your bedroom and the smell will drive away all mosquitoes. Unfortunately they are highly likely to drive away all humans too... which is the lesson to be learned here, there is no solution to mosquitoes that isn't worse than the mosquitoes.)

Draining swamps has big problems associated with it, but it does work:



-Username17

Take it from me. I have the pleasure of living in the salubrious sub-tropical climes of a city with pretty much the highest average rainfall in the US.

And the solution is:

All of the above. Do everything you can reasonably do to cut the mosquito in the hope that by stacking them all together you can make a noticeable difference. I'd start off buying citronella torches. They don't smell bad, and with enough of them gridded out, they work. Plus they can be actually be considered decorative.

Meanwhile, add in the frog/dragonfly habitat (I'd defer to PhoneLobster's advice on that one on that one). If you really want to go whole-hog, find some bug repellent spray that's environmentally friendly for your boss to use on nights when it's really bad.

Depending on how reasonable your boss is, keep 'im informed. Mention there's a lot of quackery out there, but it doesn't seem possible to get rid of them completely, just mitigate how much they show up. But if your winter was anything like the one over here in the States (if I remember right, you're in Russia, right, Starmaker?) it's going to be a baaaaad year for people in skeeter country, so the only thing you can do is mitigate the damage and endure.

FrankTrollman wrote:Draining swamps has big problems associated with it, but it does work:

How does the map relate to draining swamps?

That is the extent of malaria-bearing mosquitos at the beginning of the 20th century and at the end. Russia and the United States and even Western Europe were malarial hell holes in 1900. By the 1960s, Malaria bearing mosquitoes had been essentially wiped out by both the Soviet Union and the United States.

Wholesale genocide of mosquitoes is not impossible. The 20th century saw massive and seemingly permanent removals of many species of mosquitoes from huge swathes of the temperate zones.

-Username17

Unfortunately, DDT is the super-effective answer.

This thing claims to work, and is on sale:
http://www.mosquitomagnet.com/
...but I can't vouch for it. It makes sense at least. If you talk him into it, you'll probably get credit for placebo effect, if nothing else.

On the other end of the scale, these things:
http://www.amazon.com/Sonic-Mosquito-In ... 717&sr=8-1
are so cheap you could buy them with couch money. Nothing to lose from trying them at least.

Oh, also: garlic. If you eat enough of it you will repel mosquitoes. More importantly, if you cook it right, you will not repel humans.

There are the obvious habitat solutions: Clear terrain around the house to prevent too much shade and/or damp places. Make sure there's no standing water (no bird baths, sections of the landscape with poor drainage) nearby. If there's a pond, put a fountain and some koi in it.

If you want to get really extreme without pesticides, rip up the grass and put in a zen rock garden. Catnip, marigolds, beebalm, and floss flowers are universally acknowledged as good mosquito repellents. There are others out there that may not grow where you are like lavender and lemon grass.

The citronella is a good bet (It can be used both planted and in candles).

Does yer boss like grapefruits? (are they even eaten in Russia?)

http://www.npr.org/2011/04/18/135468567 ... grapefruit

Nootkatone is an extract from grapefruits approved safe to eat, and it acts as a repellant and also kills skeeters in seconds after contact.

Oh crap. I just read the rest of the article (I recalled hearing it on the radio apparently a year ago).

Unfortunately it is crazy expensive. I looked online and found a place selling 1 gram for almost 55 bucks plus 14 bucks shipping. NPR article says $4000 per Kg. Jeebus.

Fuck this being unemployed shit. I need to figure out a way to produce nootkatone. It doesn't look that complicated a structure. Hrmmm.

[edit: I should note that I'm not a professional organic chemist and it has been about a decade since I took those classes, so maybe I just don't know enough to know how difficult this would be. My hope is to find a much cheaper compound that is similar enough that I don't have to figure much out to get it into that form, maybe if valencene is cheap enough to oxidize it... or figure out how hard it would be to start from napthalene (which is not a nice substance) since I know that is inexpensive... probably the answer will be to start somewhere in the middle of those or a chain to turn into a bicyclic structure.]

FrankTrollman wrote:Draining swamps has big problems associated with it, but it does work:

-Username17

What sorts of problems, exactly? Is it conceivable to wipe out mosquitoes (or, more importantly, malaria) without also destroying huge swaths of the environment? I would imagine not, given how many mosquito-eating predators there are scattered around, but I'd be happy to be proven wrong.

Draining swamps may work, despite its "big problems".

But the primary thing about wholesale habitat destruction in this scenario is that not only is it evil, irresponsible and stupid, it is most likely not an option for some guy who just owns a holiday house near some sort of major mosquito habitat.

Mind you that also means that similarly evil irresponsible and stupid abuses of pesticides are also technically and legally not an option for him either since he can't and shouldn't be poisoning habitats not on his land either (and maybe not even ones that ARE on his land depending on local regulation).

If those WERE options I would still rule both out based on the solutions being unreliable and worse than the problem. But I seriously doubt that filling in swamp lands or killing all the bald eagles with DDT are really even options here.

If he's okay with just keeping them away from the house, you can get fairly cheap candles that have a basic repellent in the smoke - you burn them outside, and mozzies just don't come close. The only harm they really do is if they fall over and set fire to something.

It's not really going to help if he wants them out of the area.

Now, what Pokemon has taught us is that as a Flying Bug, they are susceptible to the following:
Fire
Ice/Cold
Electricity
Smashed by rocks (super-duper effective)
Get birds to eat them

And don't even try the following:
Earthquakes/throwing sand at them
Punching them in the face

The problem with scented candles as a mosquito repellent is pretty simple.

There are different sorts of them. They range in effectiveness and they range in how offensively stinky they are for humans. And those things seem to be pretty much directly related with the most effective being the most offensively stinky.

Between that and other inconveniences of the candle method I would only recommend using them as a partially mitigating measure for outdoor/porch/courtyard sorta dusk/evening events. They will help, and during times of year or in areas with only mild mosquito problems may be enough, but if you want something to turn back a full swamp scale mosquito invasion it's going to end up being strong enough drive the people away too, and probably won't be enough in that case anyway.

Thanks for answers, everyone!

fectin wrote:This thing claims to work, and is on sale:
http://www.mosquitomagnet.com/
...but I can't vouch for it. It makes sense at least. If you talk him into it, you'll probably get credit for placebo effect, if nothing else.

It most likely doesn't. I read up on it. Apparently, CO2 traps have existed since forever, but in the 1990s someone got the splendid idea to market them as a consumer product.

The propane-burning traps (MosquitoMagnet and similar) will trap lots of mosquitoes, as well as flies and any other flying insects that are attracted to CO2. Some studies have been done to assess whether they will actually "trap out" an area and reduce the mosquito population size, the general consensus is that they probably don't (i'll try to dig up the papers). People have no idea how large some standing mosquito population sizes can be. When I was a student trapping Culex out in the Sacramento delta, we used CO2-baited CDC traps. We had one trap that caught 30,000 mosquitoes in one night (that's 30,000 in a single pint-sized cup! You couldn't see through it - it was BLACK). We had 50 traps out there, and every one had many thousands.

Maxus wrote:Depending on how reasonable your boss is, keep 'im informed. Mention there's a lot of quackery out there, but it doesn't seem possible to get rid of them completely, just mitigate how much they show up.

I do. It's actually surprising how much quackery a nuclear powerplant builder / safety expert can eat up:

• - Oscillococcinum (still keeps buying as placebo, ugh)
  - 4life food additives (success!)
  - bullshit humidity meter (got him to buy one that does work)
  - bullshit food safety meter (too late; got him to stop advertising it)
  - local MosquitoMagner knockoff (reason for this thread)
  - graphology
  - magical thinking
  - that you need a written permit from Mozilla Corporation to use Firefox (seriously, that nearly got me fired).

He's actually reasonable when work is concerned. which is why he got let off and now priests are sprinkling hallways at the powerplant with holy water. Go buy a radiation suit or something.

fectin wrote:Oh, also: garlic. If you eat enough of it you will repel mosquitoes. More importantly, if you cook it right, you will not repel humans.

Fixed that for you.

In response to Koumei: when I was a young lad, if bees started buzzing near me I'd punch them in the face. All my strength didn't seem to do more than annoy them, but they'd take the hint after the first or second time I did it. The bees around here are pretty passive as long as you don't threaten the hive or step on them.

Starmaker wrote:which is why he got let off and now priests are sprinkling hallways at the powerplant with holy water. Go buy a radiation suit or something.

wait.... go back to that priests and holy water thing.... I want to hear more about that...

That picture does look good Koumei but I don't think becoming a cyborg is a very accepted way to deal with mosquitos these days.

Upon more investigation, it sounds like the price for nootkatone (grapefruit extract) is likely to be coming down soon as chem/biotech firms are way ahead of me in synthesizing it on their own. Hopefully this means in the next year or two there will be much cheaper, super-effective moskeeter solutions. Doesn't help ya now, but gives some hope for the future.

No, I'm referring to the priests sprinkling holy water on nuclear reactors. It's the fucking Adeptus Mechanicus, who tell you the reason your toaster burns your toast is not that the dial got bumped to 5, but that you're not praying hard enough to the toaster's spirit and it's angry at you.

Starmaker wrote:a solution to "decrease annoyance".

Seal up all the doors and windows, get a high powered air conditioner, and spend his entire vacation inside the house?

Or does he want to be outdoors at any point? Because if he does, good luck.

Avoid the things that attract them. They need 2-3 or more of the following to find you.

• Dark colours: wear white, cover any dark hair with a white hat.
• Movement (to 30'): don't walk near where they're sitting, like dark foliage.
• Moisture, octanol, and CO2 in the breath: air circulation should make it hard for them to locate a source from those, so run a ceiling fan.
• Body heat: long sleeves and pants, loose fitting cotton clothes.
• Sweat: don't sweat.

So, yeh, wear loose, cool, white clothing and a white hat, don't do any vigorous exercise because it boosts all their attractants, run a slow fan and ventilate the house, and use a normal mosquito net over the bed that easily drapes all the way to the floor all around. Physically bar them from the house if possible, take it easy and stay well away from any dark, damp places outdoors. Get your shots before going.