Every Thursday, Nanny Cay Resort and Marina maintenance worker Avery Smith spends several hours walking up and down the property, checking for potential mosquito breeding grounds and destroying the ones he finds.
It’s also crucial, as mosquitoes are a nuisance at best and a deadly threat at worst.
Luckily for Mr. Smith and others like him, the task of combating the insects has gotten a little easier over the last several months thanks to a new product being implementedthroughout the Caribbean: the In2Care Mosquito Trap.
The device — which was invented by the Netherlands-based mosquito-control company In2Care — targets the Aedes mosquito, which can carry Zika, dengue fever and chikungunya.
The trap is a water-filled pot that attracts mosquitoes to lay their eggs there. Once inside, the insects land on a floating gauze strip covered with larvicide and fungus spores, which rub onto their bodies.
The larvicide kills the larvae that hatch from the insect’s eggs, and the fungus spores infect the mosquito and kill it days later, after it has spread the larvicide to other breeding grounds.
The trap is becoming increasingly popular in the United States and the Caribbean. Nanny Cay started using it in February, and In2Care announced last month that the US Environmental Protection Agency approved its use by licensed pest control operators.
In2Care’s authorised dealer in the Virgin Islands, Drakes Traders, also donated 40 of the traps to the Ministry of Education and Culture in April to use at schools around the territory, according to the company.
While acting Chief Environmental Health Officer Minchington Israel said his agency is still testing the traps — a trial started about two months ago — Nanny Cay customer services agent Emily Simpson said the device is already proving effective.
“One of the yacht owners comes down regularly and said, ‘I’ve only got one bite this week,’” she said. “I’m like, ‘Great, it’s working.’”
Long-lasting
Ms. Simpson said the trap has replaced fogging, which is effective only for up to a week, as Nanny Cay’s primary mosquito-fighting technique. The larvicide on the traps, on the other hand, lasts for about six weeks before the gauze strips have to be changed.
But the best thing about the traps, she said, is that they do a lot of Mr. Smith’s work for him.
“What I think is so great about [the traps] is the mosquitoes spread the larvicide for you,” she said.
However, at a place like Nanny Cay, there is still plenty of work for Mr. Smith to do, including checking the traps and fighting mosquitoes at breeding grounds where the larvicide isn’t effective, such as the property’s sewage treatment plant.
To fight mosquitoes there, Mr. Smith pours diesel fuel into the sewage tanks, where it covers the liquid’s surface and suffocates mosquito larvae.
“Before we were doing this, you would come up here and find this full of larva, wigglers and stuff,” Mr. Smith said of the sewage plant. “It was a major breeding point.”
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