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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
told 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."
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