SPRINGFIELD, Ill. (IRN) — The Asian tiger mosquito is more rampant in Illinois than previously thought.
The Illinois Natural History Survey researchers recently released the results of a study from 2016 to 2017 on invasive mosquito communities and how they form and shift because of different land uses. The study discovered the Asian tiger mosquito in 18 rural, semi-rural and urban Illinois communities when they weren’t there previously, indicating a spread of the species.
“It’s just an incredibly annoying mosquito,” University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign medical entomologist Chris Stone said to The Center Square. “It’s a very aggressive biter. It bites during the daytime, so it really has the potential to be noticed and reduce people’s quality of life
According to Effingham Daily News, there is always the risk of mosquito species becoming a carrier of a virus that they’ve never acquired before due to growing their geographic range and transferring a virus to a new host. A new host could be a human or an animal.
“So, there’s just a lot of potential for let’s say an emerging or newly introduced virus,” Stone said. “There’s always the chance that this particular species could then be involved in transmission to humans. Perhaps the best example might be a virus, Chikungunya, and there have been outbreaks of that in the Indian Ocean Islands as well as in Italy, where this species has been the main vector of.”
More information needs to be found through research to discover new information on how human-altered environmental factors can change communities of mosquitos. For now, Stone urges the public to check the CDC website for suggestions on how to combat the Asian tiger mosquito in their own backyard.
“This is a mosquito that tends to develop in small containers of any kind, anything around the house that can hold water like rainwater for a few days can contribute to these mosquitoes breeding in your backyard,” Stone said. “So making sure you don’t have those containers or if you do have them, tipping them over or removing the water frequently.”
By TRINA THOMAS for the Illinois Radio Network
Photo: FILE – Mosquito | Alvesgaspar, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons