Mosquito plague taking over the skies in N. Carolina after flooding in Florence

Cassie Vadovsky returned home after picking up her 4-year-old daughter from school on Tuesday evening and was greeted by a swarm of blood-thirsty mosquitoes. Not just any mosquitoes. Aggressive, monstrous pests with stripes on their legs. “It was like a flurry – like it was snowing mosquitoes,” the stay-at-home mother of two said. “I think my car agitated them. I waited for them to calm down before I grabbed the kids and then ran into the house.” Vadovsky is just one of the many people in North Carolina who is fighting against a monster mosquito outbreak, the result of flooding caused by Hurricane Florence. “It didn’t hit automatically. It was more gradual. It took maybe three or four days after the storm passed before it got to this epidemic level,” she said. “And I’m not even on the side of town that had the major flooding. Imagine how bad it could be over on that end.” Mosquito experts say floodwaters can cause eggs that would have otherwise laid dormant for over a year to hatch – sending billions of the vicious parasites into the air. The ones plaguing the Carolinas are called “Gallinippers,” or “Psorophora ciliata,” according to entomologist Michael Waldvogel of North Carolina State University. The species can be three times as large as average mosquitoes, and the larvae are known to prey on aquatic animals that are as large as tadpoles. The females grow up to feed on large mammals, humans included. “There’s 61 species of mosquitoes in North Carolina, and, of those, probably 15 to 20 would be highly responsive to floodwaters in this way,” said Michael Reiskind, associate professor of the Department of Entomology and Plant Pathology at NCSU. “When you have major flooding, a lot of these eggs hatch, and you can see rapid population growth.” Just how much growth? Reiskind, an entomologist, surveyed an area in Raleigh, the state’s capital, around the time of Hurricane Florence to monitor mosquito populations. “Before the storm, I went out for five minutes and counted just three mosquitoes in that time. A week after the storm, in those five minutes I had eight of them. Then after two weeks, (I counted) 50 in that time, and our area didn’t get hit the hardest,” Reiskind said. Vadovsky posted a video on Facebook of the swarm around her home, generating over 76,000 views and counting. In the video, her daughter can be heard asking, “Why are you doing that – taking pictures of the wasps?” To which Vadovsky responds, “They’re not wasps. They’re mosquitoes.” One commenter on the video, Pennie Thomas, said the mosquitoes “bit me through my shoe over here in Fayetteville.” Reiskind said larger species could bite through one or two layers of cotton “pretty easily.” Vadovsky said the bloodsuckers rest on the windows outside her family’s home in large numbers, waiting to attack. When she or a relative goes outside, the mosquitoes swarm. So what’s the good news? Most mosquito species don’t do well once the weather gets cold, so the experts suspect this plague will die down in the coming weeks. Until then, Reiskind suggests people in areas ravaged by the storm wear long sleeves and spray insecticides. In the wake of the mosquito outbreak, North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper ordered $4 million in control efforts to help counties hit by Florence. “FEMA provides reimbursement for local agencies to spray for mosquitoes. So it is possible for a county health department to do aerial spraying, but not every county does it,” Reiskind said. If your area doesn’t spray, experts say Mosquito Dunks, doughnutshaped products that attack mosquitoes in their developmental stages, can help stop the spread of mosquitoes. They can be found at local hardware stores. “These small disks of freeze-dried bacteria dissipate in water and inhibit the reproductive cycle of mosquitoes. It’s not an insecticide. It’s a more natural solution that really works,” said Rachel Noble, a professor at the UNC Institute of Marine Sciences. She warned that the mosquito species in the Carolinas are capable of carrying West Nile virus and encephalitis.

GETTY IMAGES Mosquitoes are pests no matter their species, but North Carolina is dealing with some particularly big ones after Hurricane Florence.