Last night, the family was attacked by a swarm of mosquitoes. I initially wrote "the family was attached...... which is actually the same word I think. The dogs could not stop moving long enough to pee or quite literally speaking, hundreds of mosquitoes landed on them. The human victims were not spared either. I have rarely seen such a plague of insects. I was in Kansas and viewed grasshoppers at a density of about twenty per square meter. They tell me that during a real problem year there are over a hundred per square meter. That is on the ground, not in the air. Every step would send multitudes of three inch hoppers in a scurry and in your face and hair. Pandemonium would break loose and as I ran maddeningly through the field, thousands and thousands of grasshoppers would take flight. It was my first understanding of the cascade effect. Within ten steps I could stir up ten thousand locusts. There were no sea gulls in sight.
The mosquito population around our lake has been quite low for a long time. A two year drought-like environment had reduced non-predator water to Nil. A mosquito larvae had to survive in a very hungry and shrinking lake. Now, with regular rains, puddles of water all over the place, and lots of long grass to hide from dragonflies, mosquito populations have exploded to billions of mosquitoes. I estimated that if I stood still, five hundred mosquitoes would land on me and the same was happening to every mammal in the place. I also have Australian Pine trees on my property. I am not sure that is the real name but that is what we call them. They are mosquito magnets and know for being so. I do not have non-predator standing water, just a few small ponds. A drop of dew on the leaves of grass can be home to a few larvae with no predatory enemy. Dry is the enemy of the mosquito. Fifteen acres of grass filled mosquitoes is as the Xerxes army was to the 300 Spartans.
Tomorrow we will mow down the grass around the house, spray malathion in the barn and hopefully complain a little less. The dragon flies will enjoy a bounty, the martins will rule the skies and the anopheles with its Plasmodium falciparum symbiote will wait for another day.
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