General Manager Turlock Mosquito Abatement District, California, United States
Abstract: The Turlock Mosquito Abatement District (District) was established in 1946 and is tasked with providing mosquito control to the 966 square mile area of Southern Stanislaus County in the Central Valley of California. In 2019, the District made its first detection of the invasive mosquito Aedes aegypti in Stanislaus County. Following this initial discovery, Ae. aegypti quickly became established throughout the county and can now be found in all suburban locales. This has resulted in a dramatic increase in service requests resulting in the District exploring novel methods to control Aedes aegypti within the District. The biology of this mosquito and its preference for small cryptic breeding sources renders traditional mosquito control methods ineffective and inefficient in many cases. One novel approach that has shown some success in controlling these mosquitoes is Sterile Insect Technique (SIT), or more specifically in this case Incompatible Insect Technique (IIT). Male mosquitoes infected with Wolbachia are released regularly in a treatment zone and when mating with non-infected females the resulting eggs are non-viable. The District tested a 25-acre plot in south Turlock where only IIT was utilized as a control method. Infected male mosquitoes were shipped twice per week from Mosquito Mate Inc. and released at a rate of 1,200 male mosquitoes per acre, resulting in a total of 480,000 mosquitoes released over the 16-week release period. Results indicate that IIT alone may be adequate to control a population of Ae. aegypti in a localized area; while not eliminating the mosquito, population levels were reduced to below District control thresholds. Further development of this control strategy will need to occur to evolve IIT into more than just a novel technique, most notably by significantly reducing application costs and increasing the efficiency of more large-scale applications.
