Photo credit: Johan J.Ingles-Le Nobel/Flickr
MILWAUKEE — From the Chicago Tribune: Mosquitoes will be out in greater numbers than usual after all the wet weather in Wisconsin, but Illinois may bear the brunt of the insects from the severe storms.
University of Wisconsin-Madison entomologist Phil Pellitteri said that the flood conditions may have washed many of the mosquito eggs downstream and even out of the state.
“There was one case back in my career where my colleagues documented the mosquitoes in Champaign-Urbana, Illinois came from Spring Green because of winds and weather patterns and what not,” Pellitteri said. “Even though it’s going to be easy to say we’re going to have more mosquitoes in about two weeks because of the flooding, it doesn’t necessarily mean that we’re going to have record numbers of mosquitoes just because we have record amounts of rain.”
The amount of water likely will have little effect on the numbers of the little bloodsuckers later this summer, either.
“You can predict things three to four weeks out,” he said. “But when you get these repeated rains, it takes mosquitoes about 10 days to two weeks to hatch from the eggs, develop and get to adult mosquitoes. So if they’re halfway developed and all of sudden you get another 2 incher, and everything just floods, it kind of gets washed out down the river.”
Spider mites, another pest, will be virtually nonexistent because of all the rain, and Pellitteri hopes that the destructive gypsy moth population takes a hit.
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