As a recent transplant to Talkeetna, KTNA reporter Nell Salzman found herself shocked and annoyed by the swarms of mosquitoes. So she called up entomologist Derek Sikes at the University of Alaska Fairbanks to learn more about them.
“Mosquitoes could be considered to be these very fancy machines for turning blood into more mosquitoes,” he said.There are 30 mosquito species in Alaska. There are 20 in Interior Alaska, though in any one place you won’t see more than ten. Most are in the Aedes genus.They winter as eggs in water. The eggs hatch in the spring, and then the larvae feed in the water, pupate and emerge as adults in May.
Carbon dioxide stimulates the female to start host-seeking. They buzz around our heads because that’s where we expel the most CO2. All summer, they’re busy biting. Culex tarsalis transmits diseases like norovirus. Sikes would not be surprised if, by the end of this century, it became thoroughly established in places like Alaska.
Sikes says it’s hard to predict whether there will be a lot of mosquitos in a given summer, but there are four big factors in play: “Water, temperature, predators and competitors.”But Sikes says entomologists haven’t been able to find strong patterns between rainfall and mosquito abundance. There is the general rule that a wetter year leads to more mosquitoes, but there are exceptions.
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