Mosquitoes suck.
And with all the rain that’s inundated Texas this year — many parts of the state have blown past their average rainfall amounts — mosquitoes may suck extra hard this summer. For some Texas cities, that means bringing out the big guns: pickups that crawl through neighborhoods, usually in the evening, spraying insecticides to knock adult mosquitos out of the air and kill ’em dead. But the stout chemicals used by cities to keep mosquitoes in check could pose health problems for people and reduce populations of beneficial insects, environmental advocates say.
Mosquitoes are most active in Texas during the hot summer months of June, July and August, which is why communities from Amarillo to Lufkin have rolled out their fleets of mosquito trucks in recent weeks. The tanks mounted in the beds of pickups can be loaded with any number of insecticides, including organophosphates (extremely toxic and interrupt enzymes in the human nervous system) and pyrethrins (tend to kill mosquitoes but are also harmful to good bugs, fish and birds). This approach to mosquito control, called “adulticiding,” only kills mosquitoes in their final stage of life, and only when they come into direct contact with the poison; those who oppose the use of airborne chemicals for mosquito control, along with city officials who order the spraying, generally agree that the technique is costly and less effective than other methods that target larvae. So why spray at all?
