Tired of bloodthirsty mosquitoes invading your backyard fun?
A new Lexington company, MosquitoMate, has an unorthodox solution: Flood your yard with thousands of additional mosquitoes.
It’s no joke.
In fact, MosquitoMate’s technology has captured worldwide interest, offering a potential solution to curbing disease-carrying mosquito populations without the use of sprays or chemicals. The technology employs something called the Sterile Insect Technique, which in the past has worked well for controlling other insects, such as fruit flies and moths, but struggled with mosquitoes.
That is, until Stephen Dobson made a breakthrough a decade ago.
Dobson, a professor of entomology at the University of Kentucky who started MosquitoMate with his wife, Karen, made the technique work for mosquitoes by employing a common type of bacteria known as Wolbachia. When male mosquitoes carrying the Wolbachia mate with females that don’t have it, the females’ eggs don’t hatch. Mosquito populations dwindle over time as a result.
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A tray containing thousands of mosquito larvae at MosquitoMate's lab on Malabu Drive in Lexington.
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Will Bacon, MosquitoMate's operations manager, inspects a recent batch of male ZAP mosquitoes at the company's facility on Malabu Drive in Lexington.
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Karen Dobson, MosquitoMate's production manager, inspects the trays of mosquito larvae growing in their farming facility on Malabu Drive in Lexington.
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Monsi Sarranto, a lab assistant at MosquitoMate, separates the male mosquito larvae from the female larvae through the company's filtering process.
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Once separated from the females, the male ZAP mosquitoes are kept in mesh cages, where they feed on nectar and water.
And this strategy has played out in MosquitoMate’s field trials for the Environmental Protection Agency, where the application reduced mosquito numbers by some 80 percent.
Still, that doesn’t make the sales pitch any easier, Dobson acknowledged.
“When you tell people you want to introduce mosquitoes into their backyard, their eyes get really large,” he said. “But once they understand how it works and what we’re doing, it’s surprising how many are supportive. And people have been very happy with the results.”
MosquitoMate was authorized by the EPA in late 2017 to begin selling its technology in 20 U.S. states — and the company chose Lexington as the first city in which it would be offered to homeowners.
The service, which typically begins in early spring, costs about $1,500 a year for the average-sized yard and includes two releases every week of about 1,000 male mosquitoes, said Karen Dobson, MosquitoMate’s production manager.
“We’re proving out our business model,” she said. “We want to be able to understand the market and to see if homeowners are interested in this product.”
One misunderstood fact: All those new mosquitoes that customers pay MosquitoMate to unleash on their property, surprisingly, don’t translate to more mosquito bites.
That’s because the company releases only male mosquitoes, dubbed ZAP mosquitoes. And male mosquitoes don’t bite but rather feed solely on nectar and water. Only female mosquitoes bite, as they need blood to produce their eggs.
The ZAP mosquitoes don’t harm other insects or wildlife either. They target only the Asian tiger mosquito (Aedes albopictus), an invasive mosquito that has thrived in urban areas since its arrival in the United States in the mid-1980s. If you’re bitten during the day or early evening in Lexington, chances are the culprit is an Asian tiger mosquito.
While sprays or other chemical approaches may temporarily wipe out mosquitoes in a yard, offering a short-term fix, they often fall short of finding the source of the mosquito infestations: the eggs, which stay shielded in small pockets of standing water and hatch reinforcements just a few weeks later.
MosquitoMate’s ZAP mosquitoes experience no such problem.
“That’s a nice advantage of a self-delivering technology,” Stephen Dobson said. “These males have wings. They’re essentially little drones that have evolved over millions of years that are going to be constantly searching yards for the female mosquito.”
And as egg numbers decrease and mosquito numbers drop, those benefits roll over into the next season as well, creating a buffer zone around a yard, Dobson added.
“We’re having an effect on the next generation,” he said.
MosquitoMate maintains an office on Malabu Drive, where it grows tens of thousands of mosquitoes each week and separates the males from the females by hand, employing a filtering technique that exploits the fact that female larvae are larger than their male counterparts.
The company recently partnered with Verily, the science arm of Google’s parent company, Alphabet Inc., to help find a way to automate the separation process, which could boost Verily’s global efforts to combat another invasive mosquito, the yellow fever mosquito (Aedes aegypti), which spreads dengue fever, chikungunya and the Zika virus.
MosquitoMate currently employs 15 workers and plans to double its staff before rolling out its services this spring.
Quick Bites:
Mosquito Facts
• Mosquitoes, which carry and spread an assortment of diseases, are the world’s most deadly creatures, killing more people than every other animal combined.
• The Asian tiger mosquito, Kentucky’s most prevalent day-biting mosquito, has a short lifespan, usually no longer than a few weeks. While some mosquitoes can travel for miles, the Asian tiger mosquito rarely travels farther than 100 meters.
• The eggs from a female Asian tiger mosquito can hatch as many as 100 to 150 new mosquitoes.
• Mosquito eggs can survive through the cold winter months, hatching once temperatures warm.
• Asian tiger mosquitoes lay their eggs in wet, damp spots, as their eggs need water to hatch. Common egg-laying locations include house gutters, compost piles, old tires, ornamental pools or birdbaths.